Political map of Europe with countries where a Slavic language is a national language marked in shades of green. Wood green represents East Slavic languages, pale green represents West Slavic languages, and sea green represents South Slavic languages.

The current geographic distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages covers Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Central Europe and all of the territory of Russia, which includes northern and north-central Asia. Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world. The number of speakers of all Slavic languages together is estimated to be 315 million.[2][3][unreliable source?] Despite the large extent, the individual Slavic languages are considerably less differentiated than Germanic and Romance languages.

Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group. Mutual intelligibility also plays a role in determining the West, East, and South branches. Speakers of languages within the same branch will in most cases be able to understand each other at least partially, but they are generally unable to across branches (for which it would be comparable to a native English speaker trying to understand any other Germanic language).

The most obvious differences between the East, West and Slavic branches are in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages - Croatian and Slovene) are written in the Latin script, and have had more Western European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historically Roman Catholic, whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic and, with Eastern Orthodox or Uniate faithful, have had more Greek influence. East Slavic languages such as Russian have, however, during and after Peter the Great's Europeanization campaign, absorbed many words of Latin, French, German, and Italian origin.

The tripartite division of the Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. Of these, certain so-called transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by the Rusyn language/dialect of Eastern Slovakia and Western Ukraine.[4] Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language.

Although the Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other group of the Indo-European language family, enough differences exist between the various Slavic dialects and languages to make communication between speakers of different Slavic languages difficult. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a lesser degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree, as those of Slovene.

Common roots and ancestry

Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic, their immediate parent language, ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of all Indo-European languages, via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE.[5]

A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group (Lithuanian, Latvian, and the now-extinct Old Prussian), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of the Proto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto-Slavic accentology that occurred in the last three decades, however, make this view very hard to maintain nowadays, especially when one considers that there was most likely no "Proto-Baltic" language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto-Slavic.[6]

The imposition of Church Slavonic on Orthodox Slavs was often at the expense of the vernacular. Says WB Lockwood, a prominent Indo-European linguist, "It (O.C.S) remained in use to modern times but was more and more influenced by the living, evolving languages, so that one distinguishes Bulgarian, Serbian, and Russian varieties. The use of such media hampered the development of the local languages for literary purposes, and when they do appear the first attempts are usually in an artificially mixed style." (148)

Lockwood also notes that these languages have "enriched" themselves by drawing on Church Slavonic for the vocabulary of abstract concepts. The situation in the Catholic countries, where Latin was more important, was different. The Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski and the CroatianBaroque writers of the 16th century all wrote in their respective vernaculars (though Polish itself had drawn amply on Latin in the same way Russian would eventually draw on Church Slavonic).

Although Church Slavonic hampered vernacular literatures, it fostered Slavonic literary activity and abetted linguistic independence from external influences. Only the Croatian vernacular literary tradition nearly matches Church Slavonic in age. It began with the Vinodol Codex and continued through the Renaissance until the codifications of Croatian in 1830, though much of the literature between 1300 and 1500 was written in much the same mixture of the vernacular and Church Slavonic as prevailed in Russia and elsewhere.

More recent foreign influences follow the same general pattern in Slavic languages as elsewhere and are governed by the political relationships of the Slavs. In the 17th century, bourgeois Russian (delovoi jazyk) absorbed German words through direct contacts between Russians and communities of German settlers in Russia. In the era of Peter the Great, close contacts with France invited countless loan words and calques from French, a significant fraction of which not only survived but also replaced older Slavonic loans. In the 19th century, Russian influenced most literary Slavic languages by one means or another.

Differentiation

The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones.

There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old Russian or Old East Slavonic language, which existed until at least the 12th century.

Linguistic differentiation was accelerated by the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over a large territory, which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic-speaking majorities. Written documents of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries already display some local linguistic features. For example, the Freising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovene dialects (e.g. rhotacism, the word krilatec). The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script continuous text in a Slavic language.

The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non-Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed the geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria (Moravians) and those in present-day Styria, Carinthia, East Tyrol in Austria, and in the provinces of modern Slovenia, where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonisation.

Features

The Slavic languages are a relatively homogeneous family, compared with other families of Indo-European languages (e.g. Germanic, Romance, and Indo-Iranian). As late as the 10th century AD, the entire Slavic-speaking area still functioned as a single, dialectally differentiated language, termed Common Slavic. Compared with most other Indo-European languages, the Slavic languages are quite conservative, particularly in terms of morphology (the means of inflecting nouns and verbs to indicate grammatical differences). Most Slavic languages have a rich, fusional morphology that conserves much of the inflectional morphology of Proto-Indo-European.[7]

Consonants

The following table shows the inventory of consonants of Late Common Slavic:[8]

1The sound /sʲ/ did not occur in West Slavic, where it had developed to /ʃ/.

This inventory of sounds is quite similar to what is found in most modern Slavic languages. The extensive series of palatal consonants, along with the affricates *ts and *dz, developed through a series of palatalizations that happened during the Proto-Slavic period, from earlier sequences either of velar consonants followed by front vowels (e.g. *ke, *ki, *ge, *gi, *xe, and *xi), or of various consonants followed by *j (e.g. *tj, *dj, *sj, *zj, *rj, *lj, *kj, and *gj, where *j is the palatal approximant ([j], the sound of the English letter "y" in "yes" or "you").

The biggest change in this inventory results from a further general palatalization occurring near the end of the Common Slavic period, where all consonants became palatalized before front vowels. This produced a large number of new palatalized (or "soft") sounds, which formed pairs with the corresponding non-palatalized (or "hard") consonants[7] and absorbed the existing palatalized sounds *lʲ *rʲ *nʲ *sʲ. These sounds were best preserved in Russian but were lost to varying degrees in other languages (particularly Czech and Slovak). The following table shows the inventory of modern Russian:

This general process of palatalization did not occur in Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian. As a result, the modern consonant inventory of these languages is nearly identical to the Late Common Slavic inventory.

Late Common Slavic tolerated relatively few consonant clusters. However, as a result of the loss of certain formerly present vowels (the weak yers), the modern Slavic languages allow quite complex clusters, as in the Russian word взблеск [vzblʲesk] ("flash"). Also present in many Slavic languages are clusters rarely found cross-linguistically, as in Russian ртуть [rtutʲ] ("mercury") or Polish mchu [mxu] ("moss", gen. sg.). The word for "mercury" with the initial rt- cluster, for example, is also found in the other East and West Slavic languages, although Slovak retains an epenthetic vowel (ortuť).

Vowels

The sound [ɨ] occurs only in some languages (Russian and Belarusian), and even in these languages, it is unclear whether it is its own phoneme or an allophone of /i/. Nonetheless, it is a quite prominent and noticeable characteristic of the languages in which it is present.

All vowels could occur either short or long, and this was phonemic (it could not automatically be predicted from other properties of the word).

There was (at most) a single accented syllable per word, distinguished by higher pitch (as in modern Japanese) rather than greater dynamic stress (as in English).

Vowels in accented syllables could be pronounced with either a rising or falling tone (i.e. there was pitch accent), and this was phonemic.

The accent was free in that it could occur on any syllable and was phonemic.

The accent was mobile in that its position could potentially vary among closely related words within a single paradigm (e.g. the accent might land on a different syllable between the nominative and genitive singular of a given word).

Even within a given inflectional class (e.g. masculine i-stem nouns), there were multiple accent patterns in which a given word could be inflected. For example, most nouns in a particular inflectional class could follow one of three possible patterns: Either there was consistent accent on the root (pattern A), predominant accent on the ending (pattern B), or accent that moved between root and ending (pattern C). In patterns B and C, the accent in different parts of the paradigm shifted not only in location but also type (rising vs. falling). Each inflectional class had its own version of patterns B and C, which might differ significantly from one inflectional class to another.

The modern languages vary greatly in the extent to which they preserve this system. On one extreme, Serbo-Croatian preserves the system nearly unchanged (even more so in the conservative Chakavian dialect); on the other, Macedonian has basically lost the system in its entirety. Between them are found numerous variations:

Slovenian preserves most of the system but has shortened all unaccented syllables and lengthened non-final accented syllables so that vowel length and accent position largely co-occur.

Russian and Bulgarian have eliminated distinctive vowel length and tone and converted the accent into a stress accent (as in English) but preserved its position. As a result, the complexity of the mobile accent and the multiple accent patterns still exists (particularly in Russian because it has preserved the Common Slavic noun inflections, while Bulgarian has lost them).

Czech and Slovak have preserved phonemic vowel length and converted the distinctive tone of accented syllables into length distinctions. Phonemic accent is otherwise lost, but the former accent patterns are echoed to some extent in corresponding patterns of vowel length/shortness in the root. Paradigms with mobile vowel length/shortness do exist but only in a limited fashion, usually only with the zero-ending forms (nom. sg., acc. sg., and/or gen. pl., depending on inflectional class) having a different length from the other forms. (Czech has a couple of other "mobile" patterns, but they are rare and can usually be substituted with one of the "normal" mobile patterns or a non-mobile pattern.)

Old Polish had a system very much like Czech. Modern Polish has lost vowel length, but some former short-long pairs have become distinguished by quality (e.g. [o oː] > [o u]), with the result that some words have vowel-quality changes that exactly mirror the mobile-length patterns in Czech and Slovak.

Grammar

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it.(February 2013)

Similarly, Slavic languages have extensive morphophonemic alternations in their derivational and inflectional morphology,[7] including between velar and postalveolar consonants, front and back vowels, and between a vowel and no vowel.[9]

Selected cognates

The following is a very brief selection of cognates in basic vocabulary across the Slavic language family, which may serve to give an idea of the sound changes involved. This is not a list of translations: cognates have a common origin, but their meaning may be shifted and loanwords may have replaced them.

Influence on neighboring languages

Most languages of the former Soviet Union and of some neighbouring countries (for example, Mongolian) are significantly influenced by Russian, especially in vocabulary. The Romanian, Albanian, and Hungarian languages show the influence of the neighboring Slavic nations, especially in vocabulary pertaining to urban life, agriculture, and crafts and trade—the major cultural innovations at times of limited long-range cultural contact. In each one of these languages, Slavic lexical borrowings represent at least 20% of the total vocabulary. However, Romanian has much lower influence from Slavic than Albanian or Hungarian[citation needed]. This is because Slavic tribes crossed and partially settled the territories inhabited by ancient Illyrians and Vlachs on their way to the Balkans.

Although also spoken in neighbouring lands, the Germanic languages show less significant Slavic influence, partly because Slavic migrations were mostly headed south rather than west. Slavic tribes did push westwards into Germanic territory, but borrowing for the most part seems to have been from Germanic to Slavic rather than the other way: for instance, the now-extinct Polabian language was heavily influenced by German, far more than any living Slavic language today. The Slavic contributions to Germanic languages remains a moot question, though Max Vasmer, a specialist in Slavic etymology, has claimed that there were no Slavic loans into Proto-Germanic. The only Germanic languages that shows significant Slavic influence are Yiddish and the historical colonial dialects of German that were spoken East of the Oder–Neisse line, such as Silesian German (formerly spoken in Silesia and South of East Prussia) and the Eastern varieties of East Low German, with the exception of Low Prussian, which had a strong Balticsubstratum. Modern Dutch slang, especially the Amsterdam dialect, borrowed much from Yiddish in turn. However, there are isolated Slavic loans (mostly recent) into other Germanic languages. For example, the word for "border" (in modern GermanGrenze, Dutchgrens) was borrowed from the Common Slavic granica. There are, however, many cities and villages of Slavic origin in Eastern Germany, the largest of which are Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden. English derives quark (a kind of cheese, not the subatomic particle) from the German Quark, which in turn is derived from the Slavic tvarog, which means "curd". Many German surnames, particularly in Eastern Germany and Austria, are Slavic in origin. Swedish also has torg (market place) from Old Russian tъrgъ or Polish targ,[10]tolk (interpreter) from Old Slavic tlŭkŭ,[11] and pråm (barge) from West Slavonic pramŭ.[12]

A well-known Slavic word in almost all European languages is vodka, a borrowing from Russian водка (vodka) – which itself was borrowed from Polish wódka (lit. "little water"), from common Slavic voda ("water", cognate to the English word) with the diminutive ending "-ka".[13][14] Owing to the medieval fur trade with Northern Russia, Pan-European loans from Russian include such familiar words as sable.[15] The English word "vampire" was borrowed (perhaps via Frenchvampire) from GermanVampir, in turn derived from Serbian vampir, continuing Proto-Slavic*ǫpyrь,[16][17] although Polish scholar K. Stachowski has argued that the origin of the word is early Slavic *vąpěrь, going back to Turkic oobyr.[18] Several European languages, including English, have borrowed the word polje (meaning "large, flat plain") directly from the former Yugoslav languages (i.e. Slovene, Croatian, and Serbian). During the heyday of the USSR in the 20th century, many more Russian words became known worldwide: da, Soviet, sputnik, perestroika, glasnost, kolkhoz, etc. Also in the English language borrowed from Russian is samovar (lit. "self-boiling") to refer to the specific Russian tea urn.

Detailed list

The following tree for the Slavic languages derives from the Ethnologue report for Slavic languages.[19] It includes the ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-3 codes where available.

^cf. Novotná & Blažek (2007) with references. "Classical glottochronology" conducted by Czech Slavist M. Čejka in 1974 dates the Balto-Slavic split to −910±340 BCE, Sergei Starostin in 1994 dates it to 1210 BCE, and "recalibrated glottochronology" conducted by Novotná & Blažek dates it to 1400–1340 BCE. This agrees well with Trziniec-Komarov culture, localized from Silesia to Central Ukraine and dated to the period 1500–1200 BCE.

1.
Slavs
–
Slavs are the largest Indo-European ethno-linguistic group in Europe. They are native to Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, Northeastern Europe, North Asia, Slavs speak Slavic languages of the Balto-Slavic language group. From the early 6th century they spread to inhabit most of Central, states with Slavic languages comprise over 50% of the territory of Europe, therefore it is the largest ethno-linguistic group in Europe by land area. Present-day Slavic people are classified into West Slavs, East Slavs, there are an estimated 360 million Slavs worldwide. The Slavic autonym is reconstructed in Proto-Slavic as *Slověninъ, plural *Slověne, the oldest documents written in Old Church Slavonic and dating from the 9th century attest the autonym as Slověne. The word slovo and the related slava and slukh originate from the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱlew-, cognate with Ancient Greek κλῆς, whence comes the name Pericles, Latin clueo, some other theories have limited support. The English term slave eventually derives from the ethnonym Slav, Slavs were captured and enslaved by the Muslims of Spain during the ninth century AD. The Slavs under name of the Antes and the Sclaveni make their first appearance in Byzantine records in the early 6th century. Procopius wrote in 545 that the Sclaveni and the Antae actually had a name in the remote past. He described them as barbarians, who lived under democracy, and that believe in one god. They lived in scattered housing, and constantly changed settlement, regarding warfare, they were mainly foot soldiers with small shields and battleaxes, lightly clothed, some entering battle naked with only their genitals covered. And they live a life, giving no heed to bodily comforts. Jordanes described the Sclaveni having swamps and forests for their cities, another 6th-century source refers to them living among nearly impenetrable forests, rivers, lakes, and marshes. Menander Protector mentions a Daurentius that slew an Avar envoy of Khagan Bayan I. The Avars asked the Slavs to accept the suzerainty of the Avars, he declined and is reported as saying, Others do not conquer our land. The relationship between the Slavs and a called the Veneti east of the River Vistula in the Roman period is uncertain. The name may refer both to Balts and Slavs, perhaps some Slavs migrated with the movement of the Vandals to Iberia and north Africa. Around the 6th century, Slavs appeared on Byzantine borders in great numbers, the Byzantine records note that grass would not regrow in places where the Slavs had marched through, so great were their numbers

2.
Central and Eastern Europe
–
It is in use after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989–90. In scholarly literature the abbreviations CEE or CEEC are often used for this concept, the transition countries in Europe are thus classified today into two political-economic entities, CEE and CIS. According to the World Bank, the transition is over for the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 and it can be also understood as all countries of the Eastern Bloc. The definition of this varies, depending on the source. Central Europe Central and Eastern European Online Library East-Central Europe Eastern Europe Regions of Europe Baltic states Visegrád Group

3.
Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians

4.
Language family
–
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others

5.
Indo-European languages
–
The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, the most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. The Indo-European family includes most of the languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia, the ancient Tarim Basin and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic migrations, all Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other language families. In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, in 1583, English Jesuit missionary Thomas Stephens in Goa wrote a letter to his brother in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin. Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. However, neither Stephens nor Sassettis observations led to further scholarly inquiry and he included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorns suggestions did not become known and did not stimulate further research. Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission, gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving from the extremes of the language family. A synonym is Indo-Germanic, specifying the familys southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches, a number of other synonymous terms have also been used. Franz Bopps Comparative Grammar appeared between 1833 and 1852 and marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline, the classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleichers 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmanns Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmanns neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussures development of the theory may be considered the beginning of modern Indo-European studies. This led to the laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics. Isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite mentioned in Semitic Old Assyrian texts from the 20th and 19th centuries BC, Hittite texts from about 1650 BC, Armenian, writing known from the beginning of the 5th century AD

6.
Balto-Slavic languages
–
The Balto-Slavic languages are a branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It traditionally comprises the Baltic and Slavic languages, Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to a period of common development. Some linguists, however, have suggested that Balto-Slavic should be split into three equidistant groups, Eastern Baltic, Western Baltic and Slavic. One particularly innovative dialect separated from the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum and became ancestral to the Proto-Slavic language, the nature of the relationship of the Balto-Slavic languages has been the subject of much discussion from the very beginning of historical Indo-European linguistics as a scientific discipline. Baltic and Slavic share many phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic. The notable early Indo-Europeanist August Schleicher proposed a solution, From Proto-Indo-European descended Proto-Balto-Slavic. In turn, the Polish linguist Rozwadowski suggests that the similarities among Baltic and Slavic languages are a result of not only genetic relationship, thomas Olander corroborates the claim of genetic relationship in his research in the field of comparative Balto-Slavic accentology. Even though some linguists still reject a genetic relationship, most scholars accept that Baltic and Slavic languages experienced a period of common development, beekes, for example, states expressly that he Baltic and Slavic languages were originally one language and so form one group. Gray and Atkinsons application of language-tree divergence analysis supports a relationship between the Baltic and Slavic languages, dating the split of the family to about 1400 BCE. That this was using a very different methodology than other studies lends some credence to the links between the two. The Balto-Slavic languages are most often divided into Baltic and Slavic groups, with this, Ivanov and Toporov put Baltic unity in question. This model is supported by studies by V. V. Kromer. Onomastic evidence shows that Baltic languages were spoken in much wider territory than the one they cover today, all the way to Moscow. In 626, the Slavs, Persians and Avars jointly attacked the Byzantine Empire, in that campaign the Slavs fought under Avar officers. As of 2009 there was a controversy over whether the Slavs might then have been a military caste under the khaganate rather than an ethnicity. Their language—at first possibly only one local speech—once koinéized, became a lingua franca of the Avar state, however, such a theory fails to explain how Slavic spread to Eastern Europe, an area that had no historical links with the Avar Khanate. That sudden expansion of Proto-Slavic erased most of the idioms of the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum and this secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE. The Baltic and Slavic languages also share some inherited words and this indicates that the Baltic and Slavic languages share a period of common development, the Proto-Balto-Slavic language

7.
East Slavic languages
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The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of Slavic languages, currently spoken in Eastern Europe. It is the group with the largest numbers of speakers, far out-numbering the Western and Southern Slavic groups, the existing East Slavic languages are Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, Rusyn is considered to be either a separate language or a dialect of Ukrainian. The East Slavic languages descend from a predecessor, the language of the medieval Kievan Rus. All these languages use the Cyrillic script, but with particular modifications, the East Slavic territory shows a definite linguistic continuum with many transitional dialects. Between Belarusian and Ukrainian there is the Polesian dialect, which shares features from both languages, East Polesian is a transitional variety between Belarusian and Ukrainian on the one hand, and between South Russian and Ukrainian on the other hand. At the same time, Belarusian and Southern Russian form a continuous area, central or Middle Russian, the transitional step between the North and the South, became a base for the Russian literary standard. Northern Russian with its predecessor, the Old Novgorod dialect, has many original, as well, existing several centuries within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Belarusian and Ukrainian share many common elements, lexical and grammatical above all. Therefore, a crucial differentiation has to be made between the history of the East Slavic dialects and that of the literary languages employed by the Eastern Slavs. In both cases one has to keep in mind that the history of the East Slavic languages is of course a history of written texts and we do not know how the writers of the preserved texts would have spoken in everyday life. After the conversion of the East Slavic region to Christianity the people used service books borrowed from Bulgaria, the Church Slavonic language was strictly used only in text, while the colloquial language of the Bulgarians was communicated in its spoken form. Church Slavonic was a factor in the evolution of modern Russian. All of these languages are today separate in their own right, in the Russian Empire the official view was that the Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian languages were dialects of one common Russian language. In the course of the 20th century, Great Russian came to be known as Russian proper, Little Russian as Ukrainian, comrie, Bernard, Corbett, Greville G, eds. Media related to East Slavic languages at Wikimedia Commons

8.
South Slavic languages
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The South Slavic languages are one of three branches of the Slavic languages. There are approximately 30 million speakers, mainly in the Balkans and these are separated geographically from speakers of the other two Slavic branches by a belt of German, Hungarian and Romanian speakers. The first South Slavic language to be written was the variety spoken in Thessalonica, now called Old Church Slavonic and it is retained as a liturgical language in some South Slavic Orthodox churches in the form of various local Church Slavonic traditions. The South Slavic languages constitute a dialect continuum, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin constitute a single dialect within this continuum. Eastern Macedonian – Bulgarian – Old Church Slavonic – Western Slovene Serbo-Croatian and that view, however, has been challenged in recent decades. Some innovations encompassing all South Slavic languages are shared with the Eastern Slavic group and they are prevalently phonological in character, whereas morphological and syntactical isoglosses are much fewer in number. This development was identical to the loss of yer after a liquid consonant, hardening of palatals and dental affricates, e. g. š > š, č > č, c > c. South Slavic form of liquid metathesis Most of these are not exclusive in character, however, furthermore, Matasović argues, there was never a period of cultural or political unity in which Proto-South-Slavic could have existed during which Common South Slavic innovations could have occurred. The South Slavic dialects form a dialectal continuum stretching from todays southern Austria to southeast Bulgaria, standard Slovene, Bulgarian, and Macedonian are based on distinct dialects. The Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standard variants of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian are based on the same dialect, thus, in most cases national and ethnic borders do not coincide with dialectal boundaries. Note, Due to the political status of languages/dialects and different historical contexts. Torlakian is thought to fit together with Bulgarian and Macedonian into the Balkan sprachbund, because of that some researchers tend to classify it as Eastern South Slavic. Each of these primary and secondary dialectal units breaks down into subdialects, in the past, it was not uncommon for individual villages to have their own words and phrases. However, during the 20th century the local dialects have been influenced by Štokavian standards through mass media and public education, with the breakup of Yugoslavia, a rise in national awareness has caused individuals to modify their speech according to newly established standard-language guidelines. The wars have caused large migrations, changing the picture of some areas—especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In some areas, it is unclear whether location or ethnicity is the dominant factor in the dialect of the speaker. Because of this the speech patterns of some communities and regions are in a state of flux, further research over the next few decades will be necessary to determine the changes made in the dialectical distribution of this language group. The Slavomolisano dialect is spoken in three villages of the Italian region of Molise by the descendants of South Slavs who migrated from the eastern Adriatic coast during the 15th century

9.
West Slavic languages
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The West Slavic languages are a subdivision of the Slavic language group that includes Czech, Polish, Slovak, Silesian, Kashubian, Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian. The West Slavic languages are all written using Latin script, in contrast to the Cyrillic-using East Slavic branch, the early Slavic expansion reached Central Europe in c. the 7th century, and the West Slavic dialects diverged from Common Slavic over the following centuries. West Slavic polities of the 9th century include the Principality of Nitra, the West Slavic tribes settled on the eastern fringes of the Carolingian Empire, along the Limes Saxoniae. The Obotrites were given territories by Charlemagne in exchange for their support in his war against the Saxons, in the high medieval period, the West Slavic tribes were again pushed to the east by the incipient German Ostsiedlung, decisively so following the Wendish Crusade in the 11th century. The Sorbs and other Polabian Slavs like Obodrites and Veleti came under the domination of the Holy Roman Empire and were strongly Germanized. The central Polish tribe of the Polans established their own state – the Duchy of Poland – in the 10th century under Duke Mieszko I, the Bohemians established the Duchy of Bohemia in the 9th century, which was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire in the early 11th century. At the end of the 12th century the duchy was raised to the status of kingdom, lusatia, the homeland of the remaining Sorbs, became a crown land of Bohemia in the 11th century, and Silesia followed suit in 1335. The Slovaks, on the hand, never became part of the Holy Roman Empire. Hungary fell under Habsburg rule alongside Austria and Bohemia in the 16th century, thus uniting the Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, West Slavs Comparison of Czech and Slovak

10.
Eastern Europe
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Eastern Europe, also known as East Europe, is the eastern part of the European continent. There is no consensus on the area it covers, partly because the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, cultural. There are almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region, a related United Nations paper adds that every assessment of spatial identities is essentially a social and cultural construct. One definition describes Eastern Europe as an entity, the region lying in Europe with main characteristics consisting in Byzantine, Orthodox. Another definition was created during the Cold War and used more or less synonymously with the term Eastern Bloc, a similar definition names the formerly communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. Historians and social scientists generally view such definitions as outdated or relegating, several definitions of Eastern Europe exist today, but they often lack precision or are extremely general. These definitions vary both across cultures and among experts, even scientists, recently becoming more and more imprecise. The Ural Mountains, Ural River, and the Caucasus Mountains are the land border of the eastern edge of Europe. Eurovoc, a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union, provides entries for 23 EU languages, of these, those in italics are classified as Eastern Europe in this source. Other official web-pages of the European Union classify some of the countries as strictly Central European. The East–West Schism is the break of communion and theology between what are now the Eastern and Western churches which began in the 11th century and lasts until this very day and it divided Christianity in Europe, and consequently the world, into Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity. Since the Great Schism of 1054, Europe has been divided between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in the West, and the Eastern Orthodox Christian churches in the east, due to this religious cleavage, Eastern Orthodox countries are often associated with Eastern Europe. A cleavage of this sort is, however, often problematic, for example, Greece is overwhelmingly Orthodox, the fall of the Iron Curtain brought the end of the East–West division in Europe, but this geopolitical concept is sometimes still used for quick reference by the media. The Baltic states have seats in the Nordic Council as observer states and they also are members of the Nordic-Baltic Eight whereas Eastern European countries formed their own alliance called the Visegrád Group. Estonia Latvia Lithuania The Caucasus nations may be included in the definitions of Eastern Europe, the extent of their geographic or political affiliation with Europe varies by country and source. All three states are members of the European Unions Eastern Partnership program and the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, on 12 January 2002, the European Parliament noted that Armenia and Georgia may enter the EU in the future. Georgia — in modern geography, Georgia has been classified as part of Eastern Europe. Under the European Union’s geographic criteria, Georgia is viewed as part of Eastern Europe and is the only Caucasus country to be actively seeking EU membership and it is a member of Council of Europe and Eurocontrol

11.
Proto-language
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In the strict sense, a proto-language is the latest common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the start of the familys divergence into the attested daughter languages. It is therefore equivalent with the language or parental language of a language family. Moreover, a group of idioms which are not considered separate languages can also be described as descending from a unitary proto-language, occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead. Typically, the proto-language is not known directly and it is by definition a linguistic reconstruction formulated by applying the comparative method to a group of languages featuring similar characteristics. The tree is a statement of similarity and a hypothesis that the similarity results from descent from a common language, the comparative method, a process of deduction, begins from a set of characteristics, or characters, found in the attested languages. More recently such a tree has been termed perfect and the characters labelled compatible, no trees but the smallest branches are ever found to be perfect, in part because languages also evolve through horizontal transfer with their neighbours. Typically, credibility is given to the hypotheses of highest compatibility, the differences in compatibility must be explained by various applications of the wave model. Not all characters are suitable for the comparative method, for example, lexical items that are loans from a different language do not reflect the phylogeny to be tested, and if used will detract from the compatibility. Getting the right dataset for the method is a major task in historical linguistics. Some universally accepted proto-languages are Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Dravidian, in a few fortuitous instances, which have been used to verify the method and the model, a literary history exists from as early as a few millennia ago, allowing the descent to be traced in detail. The early daughter languages, and even the proto-language itself, may be attested in surviving texts, for example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan and Spanish. Likewise, Proto-Norse, the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages, is attested, albeit in fragmentary form, the first person to offer systematic reconstructions of an unattested proto-language was August Schleicher, he did so for Proto-Indo-European in 1861. Normally, the term Proto-X refers to the last common ancestor of a group of languages, occasionally attested, an earlier stage of the same language, reconstructed through the method of internal reconstruction, is termed Pre-X. This terminology is used, for example, in the case of Proto-Indo-European and Pre-Indo-European, when multiple historical stages of a single language exist, the oldest attested stage is normally termed Old X. For an earlier, hypothetical stage, reconstructed through the method of reconstruction, terminology differs, with some authors using Proto-X. This is similar to the situation of Old Norse and Proto-Norse, there are no objective criteria for the evaluation of different reconstruction systems yielding different proto-languages. Many researchers concerned with linguistic reconstruction agree that the comparative method is an intuitive undertaking. The bias of the researchers regarding the implicit knowledge can also lead to erroneous assumptions

12.
Early Middle Ages
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The Early Middle Ages marked the start of the Middle Ages of European history, lasting from the 6th to the 10th century CE. The Early Middle Ages followed the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the Early Middle Ages largely overlap with Late Antiquity. The term Late Antiquity is used to emphasize elements of continuity with the Roman Empire, the period saw a continuation of trends begun during late classical antiquity, including population decline, especially in urban centres, a decline of trade, and increased immigration. The period has been labelled the Dark Ages, a characterization highlighting the relative scarcity of literary and cultural output from this time, especially in Northwestern Europe. However, the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, continued to survive, many of these trends were reversed later in the period. In 800 the title of emperor was revived in Western Europe by Charlemagne, whose Carolingian Empire greatly affected later European social structure, Europe experienced a return to systematic agriculture in the form of the feudal system, which introduced such innovations as three-field planting and the heavy plow. Barbarian migration stabilized in much of Europe, although Northern Europe was greatly affected by the Viking expansion, starting in the 2nd century, various indicators of Roman civilization began to decline, including urbanization, seaborne commerce, and population. Archaeologists have identified only 40 percent as many Mediterranean shipwrecks from the 3rd century as from the first, estimates of the population of the Roman Empire during the period from 150 to 400 suggest a fall from 65 million to 50 million, a decline of more than 20 percent. Some scholars have connected this de-population to the Dark Ages Cold Period, Early in the 3rd century Germanic peoples migrated south from Scandinavia and reached the Black Sea, creating formidable confederations which opposed the local Sarmatians. In Dacia and on the north of the Black Sea the Goths. The arrival of the Huns in 372–375 ended the history of these kingdoms, the Huns, a confederation of central Asian tribes, founded an empire with a Turkic-speaking aristocracy. They had mastered the art of shooting composite recurve bows from horseback. The Goths sought refuge in Roman territory, agreeing to enter the Empire as unarmed settlers, however many bribed the Danube border-guards into allowing them to bring their weapons. The discipline and organization of a Roman legion made it a fighting unit. The Romans preferred infantry to cavalry because infantry could be trained to retain the formation in combat, while cavalry tended to scatter when faced with opposition. While a barbarian army could be raised and inspired by the promise of plunder, the legions required a government and taxation to pay for salaries, constant training, equipment. The decline in agricultural and economic activity reduced the empires taxable income, in the Gothic War, the Goths revolted and confronted the main Roman army in the Battle of Adrianople. The general decline in discipline also led to the use of smaller shields, not wanting to share the glory, Eastern Emperor Valens ordered an attack on the Therving infantry under Fritigern without waiting for Western Emperor Gratian, who was on the way with reinforcements

13.
Baltic languages
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The Baltic languages belong to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Baltic languages are spoken by the Balts, mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe, scholars usually regard them as a single language family divided into two groups, Western Baltic, and Eastern Baltic. The range of the Eastern Balts once reached to the Ural mountains, Old Prussian, a Western Baltic language that became extinct in the 18th century, ranks as the most archaic of the Baltic languages. Although related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, and particularly the Old Prussian vocabularies differ substantially from one another and are not mutually intelligible, the Baltic languages are generally thought to form a single family with two branches, Eastern and Western. However, these two branches are sometimes classified as independent branches of Balto-Slavic, galindian † Old Prussian † Sudovian †. Key evidence of Baltic language presence in these regions is found in hydronyms that are characteristically Baltic, the use of hydronyms is generally accepted to determine the extent of a cultures influence, but not the date of such influence. Though included among the Baltic states due to its location, the language of Estonia, Estonian, is a Uralic language and is not related to the Baltic languages, which are Indo-European. It is believed that the Baltic languages are among the most archaic of the currently remaining Indo-European languages, Lithuanian was first attested in a hymnal translation in 1545, the first printed book in Lithuanian, a Catechism by Martynas Mažvydas was published in 1547 in Königsberg, Prussia. Latvian appeared in a hymnal in 1530 and in a printed Catechism in 1585, during the years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, official documents were written in Polish, Ruthenian and Latin. However, linguists have had a time establishing the precise relationship of the Baltic languages to other languages in the Indo-European family. Several of the extinct Baltic languages have a limited or nonexistent written record, their existence being known only from the records of ancient historians, all of the languages in the Baltic group were first written down relatively late in their probable existence as distinct languages. These two factors combined with others have obscured the history of the Baltic languages, leading to a number of theories regarding their position in the Indo-European family. The Baltic languages show a relationship with the Slavic languages. This family is considered to have developed from a common ancestor, later on, several lexical, phonological and morphological dialectisms developed, separating the various Balto-Slavic languages from each other. The traditional view is that the Balto-Slavic languages split into two branches, Baltic and Slavic, with each branch developing as a common language for some time afterwards. Proto-Baltic is then thought to have split into East Baltic and West Baltic branches, however, more recent scholarship has suggested that there was no unified Proto-Baltic stage, but that Proto-Balto-Slavic split directly into three groups, Slavic, East Baltic and West Baltic. Under this view, the Baltic family is paraphyletic, and consists of all Balto-Slavic languages that are not Slavic and this would imply that Proto-Baltic, the last common ancestor of all Baltic languages, would be identical to Proto-Balto-Slavic itself, rather than distinct from it. Finally, there is a minority of scholars who argue that Baltic descended directly from Proto-Indo-European and they argue that the many similarities and shared innovations between Baltic and Slavic are due to several millennia of contact between the groups, rather than shared heritage

14.
National language
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A national language is a that has some connection—de facto or de jure—with people and the territory they occupy. There is little consistency in the use of this term, one or more languages spoken as first languages in the territory of a country may be referred to informally or designated in legislation as national languages of the country. National and/or official languages are mentioned in over 150 world constitutions, the last is usually given the title of official language. Standard languages, such as Standard German, Standard French, and Standard Spanish, may serve as national, regional, National language and official language are best understood as two concepts or legal categories with ranges of meaning that may coincide, or may be intentionally separate. Stateless nations are not in the position to legislate an official language, some languages may be recognized popularly as national languages, while others may enjoy official recognition in use and/or promotion. Albanian is the language in Albania and Kosovo and a regional national language for parts of Macedonia. Arabic is the language in Algeria. Berber is also an official language, French has no official status but is widely used in education, business and the media. Andorras national language is Catalan, moreover Catalan is a language in several territories in Spain. Azerbaijan Azerbaijani language is the language in Azerbaijan. Australia has no language, but is largely monolingual with English being the de facto national language. A considerable proportion of first and second generation migrants are bilingual, according to Ethnologue, 81% of people spoke English at home, including L2 speakers. Other languages spoken at home included Chinese 2. 9%, Italian 1. 2%, Arabic 1. 1%, Greek 1%, Vietnamese 0. 9%, there were almost 400 languages spoken by Indigenous Australians prior to the arrival of Europeans. Only about 70 of these languages have survived and all but 30 of these are now endangered, bengali is the sole official language of Bangladesh. Bulgarian is the language in Bulgaria. Canadas official languages since the Official Languages Act of 1969 are English, Quebec nationalists consider Quebec French the national language of the Quebec nation. As well, two of Canadas northern territories legislate a variety of Indigenous languages, as these official languages are legislated at a territorial level, they can be construed as national languages. Notably the Cree language is spoken from Alberta to Labrador, Anishinaabemowin is spoken across central Canada, there are many languages spoken across China, with most people speaking one of several varieties of Chinese

15.
Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi

16.
Belarusian language
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Belarusian is an official language of Belarus, along with Russian, and is spoken abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and small parts in far-eastern Poland. Following independence, it became known as Belarusian. Belarusian is one of the East Slavic languages and shares many grammatical and lexical features with other members of the group, to some extent, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian are mutually intelligible. Its predecessor stage is known as Ruthenian, in turn descended from Old East Slavic, at the 1999 Belarus Census, the Belarusian language was declared as a language spoken at home by about 3,686,000 Belarusian citizens. About 6,984,000 of Belarusians declared it their mother tongue, other sources put the population of the language as 6,715,000 in Belarus and 9,081,102 in all countries. According to a study done by the Belarusian government in 2009, 72% of Belarusians speak Russian at home,29. 4% of Belarusians can write, speak, and read Belarusian, while 52. 5% can only read and speak it. Although closely related to other East Slavic languages, especially Ukrainian, Belarusian phonology is distinct in a number of ways, the phoneme inventory of the modern Belarusian language consists of 45 to 54 phonemes,6 vowels and 39 to 48 consonants, depending on how they are counted. When the nine geminate consonants are excluded as mere variations, there are 39 consonants, the number 48 includes all consonant sounds, including variations and rare sounds, which may be semantically distinct in the modern Belarusian language. The Belarusian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic script, which was first used as an alphabet for the Old Church Slavonic language, the modern Belarusian form was defined in 1918, and consists of thirty-two letters. Before that, Belarusian had also written in the Belarusian Latin alphabet, the Belarusian Arabic alphabet. The Glagolitic script had been used, sporadically, until the 11th or 12th century, there are several systems of romanizing written Belarusian text in existence, see Romanization of Belarusian. Standardized Belarusian grammar in its form was adopted in 1959. It was developed from the form set down by Branislaw Tarashkyevich. Historically, there had existed several other alternative standardized forms of Belarusian grammar and it is mainly based on the Belarusian folk dialects of Minsk-Vilnius region. Belarusian grammar is mostly synthetic and partly analytic, and overall is similar to Russian grammar. The most significant instance of this is in the representation of vowel reduction, and in particular akannye, the merger of unstressed /a/ and /o/, Belarusian always spells this merged sound as ⟨a⟩, whereas Russian uses either ⟨a⟩ or ⟨o⟩, according to what the underlying phoneme is. This can significantly complicate the task of foreign speakers in learning these paradigms, besides the literary norm, there exist two main dialects of the Belarusian language, the North-Eastern and the South-Western. In addition, there exist the transitional Middle Belarusian dialect group, the North-Eastern dialect is chiefly characterized by the soft sounding R and strong akanye, and the South-Western dialect is chiefly characterized by the hard sounding R and moderate akanye

17.
Ukrainian language
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Ukrainian /juːˈkreɪniən/ is an East Slavic language. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic script, historical linguists trace the origin of the Ukrainian language to the Old East Slavic of the early medieval state of Kievan Rus. After the fall of the Kievan Rus as well as the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, the Modern Ukrainian language has been in common use since the late 17th century, associated with the establishment of the Cossack Hetmanate. From 1804 until the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian language was banned from schools in the Russian Empire and it has always maintained a sufficient base in Western Ukraine, where the language was never banned, in its folklore songs, itinerant musicians, and prominent authors. The Ukrainian language retains a degree of intelligibility with Belarusian and Russian. The first theory of the origin of Ukrainian language was suggested in Imperial Russia in the middle of the 18th century by Mikhail Lomonosov and this theory posits the existence of a common language spoken by all East Slavic people in the time of the Rus. Another point of view developed during the 19th and 20th centuries by linguists of Imperial Russia, like Lomonosov, they assumed the existence of a common language spoken by East Slavs in the past. This general point of view is the most accepted amongst academics worldwide, the supporters of this theory disagree, however, about the time when the different languages were formed. Soviet scholars set the divergence between Ukrainian and Russian only at time periods. During the time of the incorporation of Ruthenia into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and this point of view is, however, at variance with some historical data. In fact, several East Slavic tribes, such as Polans, Drevlyans, Severians, Dulebes, White Croats, Tiverians, notably, some Ukrainian features were recognizable in the southern dialects of Old East Slavic as far back as the language can be documented. In contrast, Ahatanhel Krymsky and Alexei Shakhmatov assumed the existence of the spoken language of Eastern Slavs only in prehistoric times. According to their point of view, the diversification of the Old East Slavic language took place in the 8th or early 9th century, Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky went even further, denying the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. Similar points of view were shared by Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo, Ivan Ohienko, according to this theory, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages during the 6th through 9th centuries. The Ukrainian language was formed by convergence of tribal dialects, mostly due to a migration of the population within the territory of todays Ukraine in later historical periods. This point of view was supported by George Shevelovs phonological studies. During the 13th century, when German settlers were invited to Ukraine by the princes of Galicia-Vollhynia and their influence would continue under Poland not only through German colonists but also through the Yiddish-speaking Jews. Often such words involve trade or handicrafts, examples of words of German or Yiddish origin spoken in Ukraine include dakh, rura, rynok, kushnir, and majster

18.
Polish language
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Polish is a West Slavic language spoken primarily in Poland and is the native language of the Poles. It belongs to the Lechitic subgroup of the West Slavic languages, Polish is the official language of Poland, but it is also used throughout the world by Polish minorities in other countries. It is one of the languages of the European Union. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet, which has 9 additions to the letters of the basic Latin script, Polish is closely related to Kashubian, Silesian, Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian, Czech and Slovak. It is also the second most widely spoken Slavic language, after Russian, in history, Polish is known to be an important language, both diplomatically and academically in Central and Eastern Europe. Today, Polish is spoken by over 38.5 million people as their first language in Poland. It is also spoken as a language in western parts of Belarus and Ukraine, west and central Lithuania, as well as the northern parts of the Czech Republic. There are 55 million Polish language speakers around the world, Polish began to emerge as a distinct language around the 10th century, the process largely triggered by the establishment and development of the Polish state. With Christianity, Poland also adopted the Latin alphabet, which made it possible to write down Polish, the precursor to modern Polish is the Old Polish language. Ultimately, Polish is thought to descend from the unattested Proto-Slavic language, Poland is the most linguistically homogeneous European country, nearly 97% of Polands citizens declare Polish as their first language. Elsewhere, Poles constitute large minorities in Lithuania, Belarus, Polish is the most widely used minority language in Lithuanias Vilnius County and is found elsewhere in southeastern Lithuania. There are significant numbers of Polish speakers among Polish emigrants and their descendants in many other countries, in the United States, Polish Americans number more than 11 million but most of them cannot speak Polish fluently. The largest concentrations of Polish speakers reported in the census were found in three states, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey. Enough people in these areas speak Polish that PNC Financial Services offer services available in Polish at all of their machines in addition to English and Spanish. According to the 2011 census there are now over 500,000 people in England, in Canada, there is a significant Polish Canadian population, There are 242,885 speakers of Polish according to the 2006 census, with a particular concentration in Toronto and Montreal. The geographical distribution of the Polish language was affected by the territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II. Poles settled in the Recovered Territories in the west and north and this tendency toward a homogeneity also stems from the vertically integrated nature of the authoritarian Polish Peoples Republic. The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still speak standard Polish somewhat differently, first-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty distinguishing regional variations

19.
Czech language
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Czech, historically also Bohemian, is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group. It is spoken by over 10 million people and is the language of the Czech Republic. Czech is closely related to Slovak, to the point of being intelligible to a very high degree. In the later 18th to mid-19th century, the written standard was codified in the context of the Czech National Revival. The main vernacular, known as Common Czech, is based on the vernacular of Prague, the Moravian dialects spoken in the eastern part of the country are mostly also counted as Czech, although some of their eastern variants are closer to Slovak. The Czech phoneme inventory is moderate in size, comprising five vowels, words may contain uncommon consonant clusters, including one consonant represented by the grapheme ř, or lack vowels altogether. Czech orthography is simple, and has used as a model by phonologists. Czech is classified as a member of the West Slavic sub-branch of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and this branch includes Polish, Kashubian, Upper and Lower Sorbian and Slovak. Slovak is by far the closest genetic neighbor of Czech, the West Slavic languages are spoken in an area classified as part of Central Europe. Around the 7th century, the Slavic expansion reached Central Europe, the West Slavic polity of Great Moravia formed by the 9th century. The Christianization of Bohemia took place during the 9th and 10th centuries, the Bohemian language is first recorded in writing in glosses and short notes during the 12th to 13th centuries. Literary works written in Czech appear in the early 14th century, the first complete Bible translation also dates to this period. Old Czech texts, including poetry and cookbooks, were produced outside the university as well, literary activity becomes widespread in the early 15th century in the context of the Bohemian Reformation. There was no standardization distinguishing between Czech and Slovak prior to the 15th century, the publication of the Kralice Bible between 1579 and 1593 became very important for standardization of the Czech language in the following centuries. In 1615, the Bohemian diet tried to declare Czech to be the official language of the kingdom. After the Bohemian Revolt which was defeated by the Habsburgs in 1620 and this emigration together with other consequences of the Thirty Years War had a negative impact on the further use of the Czech language. In 1627, Czech and German became official languages of the Kingdom of Bohemia and in the 18th century German became dominant in Bohemia and Moravia, the modern standard Czech language originates in standardization efforts of the 18th century. Changes include the shift of í to ej and é to í and the merging of í

20.
Slovak language
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Slovak /ˈsloʊvæk, -vɑːk/ is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages. Slovak is the language of Slovakia where it is spoken by approximately 5.51 million people. Slovak uses the Latin script with modifications that include the four diacritics placed above certain letters The primary principle of Slovak spelling is the phonemic principle. The secondary principle is the principle, forms derived from the same stem are written in the same way even if they are pronounced differently. An example of principle is the assimilation rule. In addition, the rules are present, When a voiced consonant is at the end of a word before a pause. For example, pohyb is pronounced /poɦip/ and prípad is pronounced /priːpat/, the assimilation rule, Consonant clusters containing both voiced and voiceless elements are entirely voiced if the last consonant is a voiced one, or voiceless if the last consonant is voiceless. For example, otázka is pronounced /otaːska/ and vzchopiť sa is pronounced /fsxopitsːa/ and this rule applies also over the word boundary. For example, prísť domov /priːzɟ domou̯/ and viac jahôd /vi̯adz jaɦu̯ot/, the voiced counterpart of ch /x/ is /ɣ/, and the unvoiced counterpart of h /ɦ/ is /x/. Most foreign words receive Slovak spelling immediately or after some time, for example, weekend is spelled víkend, software – softvér, gay – gej, and quality is spelled kvalita. Personal and geographical names from languages using Latin alphabets keep their original spelling unless a fully Slovak form of the name exists. Slovak features some heterophonic homographs, the most common examples being krásne /ˈkraːsne/ versus krásne /ˈkraːsɲe/, Some examples include the following, Speváčka spieva. My speváčky spievame. and so forth, adjectives, pronouns and numerals agree in person, gender and case with the noun to which they refer. Botanic or zoological terms are exceptions as is the naming of Holy Spirit in a majority of churches, word order in Slovak is relatively free, since strong inflection enables the identification of grammatical roles regardless of word placement. This relatively free word order allows the use of word order to convey topic, Some examples are as follows, Ten veľký muž tam dnes otvára obchod. = That big man opens a store there today, – The word order does not emphasize any specific detail, just general information. Ten veľký muž dnes otvára obchod tam, = That big man is today opening a store there. – This word order emphasizes the place, dnes tam otvára obchod ten veľký muž

21.
Slovene language
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Slovene or Slovenian belongs to the group of South Slavic languages. It is spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide and it is the first language of about 2.1 million Slovenian people and is one of the 24 official and working languages of the European Union. Standard Slovene is the standard language that was formed in the 18th century, mostly based on Upper and Lower Carniolan dialect groups. For example, the Resian and Torre dialects in the Italian Province of Udine differ most from other Slovene dialects, the distinctive characteristics of Slovene are dual grammatical number, two accentual norms, and abundant inflection. Although Slovene is basically an SVO language, word order is very flexible, Slovene has a T-V distinction, second-person plural forms are used for individuals as a sign of respect. Slovene and Slovak are the two modern Slavic languages whose names for themselves literally mean Slavic. Slovene is an Indo-European language belonging to the Western subgroup of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages, furthermore, Slovene shares certain linguistic characteristics with all South Slavic languages, including those of the Eastern subgroup, such as Bulgarian. The Slovene language also has commonalities with the West Slavic languages. Like all Slavic languages, Slovene traces its roots to the same group of languages that produced Old Church Slavonic. The earliest known examples of a distinct, written Slovene dialect are from the Freising Manuscripts, the consensus estimate of their date of origin is between 972 and 1093. These religious writings are among the oldest surviving manuscripts in any Slavic language and this linguistic border remained almost unchanged until the late 19th century, when a second process of Germanization took place, mostly in Carinthia. Between the 9th and 12th century, proto-Slovene spread into northern Istria, during most of the Middle Ages, Slovene was a vernacular language of the peasantry, although it was also spoken in most of the towns on Slovene territory, together with German or Italian. Although during this time, German emerged as the language of the nobility, Slovene had some role in the courtly life of the Carinthian, Carniolan and Styrian nobility. This is proved by the survival of certain ritual formulas in Slovene, the words Buge waz primi, gralva Venus. The first printed Slovene words, stara pravda, appeared in 1515 in Vienna in a poem of the German mercenaries who suppressed the Slovene peasant revolt. Standard Slovene emerged in the half of the 16th century, thanks to the works of Slovene Lutheran authors. During this period, German had a influence on Slovene. Many Slovene scientists before the 1920s also wrote in languages, mostly German

22.
Serbo-Croatian
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It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties. South Slavic dialects historically formed a continuum, the turbulent history of the area, particularly due to expansion of the Ottoman Empire, resulted in a patchwork of dialectal and religious differences. Due to population migrations, Shtokavian became the most widespread in the western Balkans, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs differ in religion and were historically often part of different cultural circles, although a large part of the nations have lived side by side under foreign overlords. Serbo-Croatian was standardized in the mid-19th-century Vienna Literary Agreement by Croatian and Serbian writers and philologists, from the very beginning, there were slightly different literary Serbian and Croatian standards, although both were based on the same Shtokavian subdialect, Eastern Herzegovinian. In the 20th century, Serbo-Croatian served as the language of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The breakup of Yugoslavia affected language attitudes, so that social conceptions of the language separated on ethnic, since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnian has likewise been established as an official standard in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and there is an ongoing movement to codify a separate Montenegrin standard. Serbo-Croatian thus generally goes by the ethnic names Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, like other South Slavic languages, Serbo-Croatian has a simple phonology, with the common five-vowel system and twenty-five consonants. Its grammar evolved from Common Slavic, with inflection, preserving seven grammatical cases in nouns, pronouns. Verbs exhibit imperfective or perfective aspect, with a complex tense system. Serbo-Croatian is a language with flexible word order, subject–verb–object being the default. It can be written in Serbian Cyrillic or Gajs Latin alphabet, whose thirty letters mutually map one-to-one, throughout the history of the South Slavs, the vernacular, literary, and written languages of the various regions and ethnicities developed and diverged independently. Prior to the 19th century, they were collectively called Illyric, Slavic, at that time, Serb and Croat lands were still part of the Ottoman and Austrian Empires. Officially, the language was called variously Serbo-Croat, Croato-Serbian, Serbian and Croatian, Croatian and Serbian, Serbian or Croatian, Croatian or Serbian, today, use of the term Serbo-Croatian is controversial due to the prejudice that nation and language must match. Old Church Slavonic was adopted as the language of the liturgy and this language was gradually adapted to non-liturgical purposes and became known as the Croatian version of Old Slavonic. The two variants of the language, liturgical and non-liturgical, continued to be a part of the Glagolitic service as late as the middle of the 19th century, the earliest known Croatian Church Slavonic Glagolitic manuscripts are the Glagolita Clozianus and the Vienna Folia from the 11th century. Serbo-Croatian competed with the established literary languages of Latin and Old Slavonic in the west and Persian. Old Slavonic developed into the Serbo-Croatian variant of Church Slavonic between the 12th and 16th centuries, the Baška tablet from the late 11th century was written in Glagolitic. It is a stone tablet found in the small Church of St. Lucy

23.
Macedonian language
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It is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Romania and Serbia. Standard Macedonian was implemented as the language of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1945 and has since developed a modern literature. Most of the codification was formalized during the same period, Macedonian dialects form a continuum with Bulgarian dialects, they in turn form a broader continuum with Serbo-Croatian through the transitional Torlakian dialects. The name of the Macedonian language is a matter of controversy in Greece. Macedonians closest relative is Bulgarian, with which it has a degree of mutual intelligibility. The next closest relative is Serbo-Croatian, all South Slavic languages, including Macedonian, form a dialect continuum. Its other principal members are Romanian, Greek and Albanian, all of which belong to different genetic branches of the Indo-European family and they are also the only Slavic languages with any definite articles. Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Indo-European languages that use of the narrative mood. Prior to the codification of the language, Macedonian dialects were described by linguists as being either dialects of Bulgarian or Serbian. Similarly, Torlakian was also regarded as Bulgarian. On the other hand, many Macedonian intellectuals maintained that their language was neither a dialect of Serbian nor of Bulgarian, but the core of its standard was not formed out of dialects or variants that had ever been covered by the Bulgarian standard. Consequently, its autonomy could not have resulted from a conscious distancing of a variant of a pluricentric language, like the other South Slavic standards, the Macedonian standard was based on dialects which had never before been covered by a standard. Modern questions of classification are largely shaped by political and social factors, likewise, this view does not take into account the fact that a Macedonian koiné language was already in existence. The codifiers ultimately chose the dialects, but did so because they were most widespread. The population of the Republic of Macedonia was 2,022,547 in 2002, outside of the Republic, there are Macedonians living in other parts of the geographical area of Macedonia. There are ethnic Macedonian minorities in neighbouring Albania, in Bulgaria, in Greece, according to the official Albanian census of 1989,4,697 ethnic Macedonians reside in Albania. A large number of Macedonians live outside the traditional Balkan Macedonian region, with Australia, Canada, according to a 1964 estimate, approximately 580,000 Macedonians live outside of the Macedonian Republic, nearly 30% of the total population. The Macedonian language has the status of official language only in the Republic of Macedonia, and is a minority and official language in parts of Albania, Romania

24.
Bulgarian language
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Bulgarian /bʌlˈɡɛəriən/, /bʊlˈ-/ is an Indo-European language, a member of the Southern branch of the Slavic language family. Various evidential verb forms exist to express unwitnessed, retold, with the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Bulgarian became one of the official languages of the European Union. Development of the Bulgarian language may be divided into several periods, prehistoric period – occurred between the Slavonic migration to eastern Balkans and the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to Great Moravia in the 860s. Old Bulgarian – a literary norm of the southern dialect of the Common Slavic language from which Bulgarian evolved. It was used by Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples to translate the Bible, Middle Bulgarian – a literary norm that evolved from the earlier Old Bulgarian, after major innovations were accepted. It was a language of literary activity and the official administration language of the Second Bulgarian Empire. Modern Bulgarian – dates from the 16th century onwards, undergoing general grammar, present-day written Bulgarian language was standardized on the basis of the 19th-century Bulgarian vernacular. Bulgarian was the first Slavic language attested in writing, as Slavic linguistic unity lasted into late antiquity, in the oldest manuscripts this language was initially referred to as языкъ словяньскъ, the Slavic language. In the Middle Bulgarian period this name was replaced by the name языкъ блъгарьскъ. In some cases, the name языкъ блъгарьскъ was used not only with regard to the contemporary Middle Bulgarian language of the copyist but also to the period of Old Bulgarian. During the Middle Bulgarian period, the language underwent dramatic changes, losing the Slavonic case system, today one difference between Bulgarian dialects in the country and literary spoken Bulgarian is the significant presence of Old Bulgarian words and even word forms in the latter. Russian loans are distinguished from Old Bulgarian ones on the basis of the presence of specifically Russian phonetic changes, as in оборот, непонятен, ядро and others. As usual in cases, many other loans from French, English. Modern Bulgarian was based essentially on the Eastern dialects of the language, between 1835–1878 more than 25 proposals were put forward and linguistic chaos ensued. Eventually the eastern dialects prevailed, and in 1899 the Ministry of Education officially codified a standard Bulgarian language based on the Drinov-Ivanchev orthography, the language is mainly split into two broad dialect areas, based on the different reflexes of the Common Slavic yat vowel. This split, which occurred at some point during the Middle Ages, led to the development of Bulgarias, E. g. млеко – milk, хлеб – bread. This rule obtains in most Eastern dialects, although some have ya, or an open e sound. The literary language norm, which is based on the Eastern dialects

25.
Balkans
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The Balkan Peninsula, or the Balkans, is a peninsula and a cultural area in Eastern and Southeastern Europe with various and disputed borders. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch from the Serbia-Bulgaria border to the Black Sea, the highest point of the Balkans is Mount Musala 2,925 metres in the Rila mountain range. In Turkish, Balkan means a chain of wooded mountains, the name is still preserved in Central Asia with the Balkan Daglary and the Balkan Province of Turkmenistan. A less popular hypothesis regarding its etymology is that it derived from the Persian Balā-Khāna, from Antiquity through the Middle Ages, the Balkan Mountains had been called by the local Thracian name Haemus. According to Greek mythology, the Thracian king Haemus was turned into a mountain by Zeus as a punishment, a reverse name scheme has also been suggested. D. Dechev considers that Haemus is derived from a Thracian word *saimon, a third possibility is that Haemus derives from the Greek word haema meaning blood. The myth relates to a fight between Zeus and the monster/titan Typhon, Zeus injured Typhon with a thunder bolt and Typhons blood fell on the mountains, from which they got their name. The earliest mention of the name appears in an early 14th-century Arab map, the Ottomans first mention it in a document dated from 1565. There has been no other documented usage of the word to refer to the region before that, there is also a claim about an earlier Bulgar Turkic origin of the word popular in Bulgaria, however it is only an unscholarly assertion. The word was used by the Ottomans in Rumelia in its meaning of mountain, as in Kod̲j̲a-Balkan, Čatal-Balkan, and Ungurus-Balkani̊. The concept of the Balkans was created by the German geographer August Zeune in 1808, during the 1820s, Balkan became the preferred although not yet exclusive term alongside Haemus among British travelers. Among Russian travelers not so burdened by classical toponymy, Balkan was the preferred term, zeunes goal was to have a geographical parallel term to the Italic and Iberian Peninsula, and seemingly nothing more. The gradually acquired political connotations are newer and, to a large extent, after the dissolution of Yugoslavia beginning in June 1991, the term Balkans again received a negative meaning, especially in Croatia and Slovenia, even in casual usage. A European Union initiative of 1999 is called the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, and its northern boundary is often given as the Danube, Sava and Kupa Rivers. The Balkan Peninsula has an area of about 470,000 km2. It is more or less identical to the known as Southeastern Europe. As of 1920 until World War II, Italy included Istria, the current territory of Italy includes only the small area around Trieste inside the Balkan Peninsula. However, the regions of Trieste and Istria are not usually considered part of the Balkans by Italian geographers, the Western Balkans is a neologism coined to describe the countries of ex-Yugoslavia and Albania

26.
Central Europe
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Central Europe lies between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. The concept of Central Europe is based on a historical, social and cultural identity. Central Europe is going through a phase of strategic awakening, with such as the CEI, Centrope. While the regions economy shows high disparities with regard to income, elements of unity for Western and Central Europe were Roman Catholicism and Latin. According to Hungarian historian Jenő Szűcs, foundations of Central European history at the first millennium were in connection with Western European development. The keyword of Western social development after millennium was the spread of liberties and autonomies in Western Europe and these phenomena appeared in the middle of the 13th century in Central European countries. There were self-governments of towns, counties and parliaments, in 1335 under the rule of the King Charles I of Hungary, the castle of Visegrád, the seat of the Hungarian monarchs was the scene of the royal summit of the Kings of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary. They agreed to cooperate closely in the field of politics and commerce, in the Middle Ages, countries in Central Europe adopted Magdeburg rights. Before 1870, the industrialization that had developed in Western and Central Europe, even in Eastern Europe, industrialization lagged far behind. Russia, for example, remained rural and agricultural. The concept of Central Europe was already known at the beginning of the 19th century, an example of that-time vision of Central Europe may be seen in J. Partsch’s book of 1903. On 21 January 1904, Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftsverein was established in Berlin with economic integration of Germany, another time, the term Central Europe became connected to the German plans of political, economic and cultural domination. The bible of the concept was Friedrich Naumann’s book Mitteleuropa in which he called for a federation to be established after the war. The concept failed after the German defeat in World War I, the revival of the idea may be observed during the Hitler era. According to Emmanuel de Martonne, in 1927 the Central European countries included, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, italy and Yugoslavia are not considered by the author to be Central European because they are located mostly outside Central Europe. The author use both Human and Physical Geographical features to define Central Europe, the interwar period brought new geopolitical system and economic and political problems, and the concept of Central Europe took a different character. The centre of interest was moved to its eastern part – the countries that have appeared on the map of Europe, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, however, the conflict of interests was too big and neither Little Entente nor Intermarium ideas succeeded. The interwar period brought new elements to the concept of Central Europe, after the war, the Eastern part of Central Europe was placed at the centre of the concept

27.
Rusyn language
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Rusyn /ˈruːsᵻn/, also known in English as Ruthene UK /rʊˈθiːn/ US /ruːˈθiːn/, is an Eastern Slavic language spoken by the Rusyns of Eastern Europe and historically in parts of Central Europe. There are controversial political implications about the nature of Rusyn as a language or dialect, some linguists treat it as a distinct language, whereas some Ukrainian scholars of Slavic languages treat it as a dialect of Ukrainian. The classification and identification of the Rusyn language is historically and politically problematic, before World War I, Rusyns were recognized as the Ukrainians of Galicia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand had planned to them as one of the ten states of a planned United States of Greater Austria before his assassination. After the war, Austria-Hungary was partitioned, and Carpathian Ukraine was appended to the new Czechoslovak state as its easternmost province, with the advent of World War II, Carpathian Ukraine declared its independence, lasting one day, until its annexation by Hungary. Poland did the same, using internal exile to move all Rusyns from the homelands to western areas conquered from Germany. Scholars with the former Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies in Moscow formally re-acknowledged Rusyn as a language in 1992. These studies were supported by the Russian Academy of Sciences. Ukrainian politicians do not recognise Rusyns as an ethnicity, regardless of Rusyn self-identification. Ukraine officially considers Rusyn a dialect of Ukrainian, related to the Hutsul dialect of Ukrainian, attempts to standardise variants of Rusyn have been unsuccessful. Rusyns live in four countries, and efforts are hampered because Rusyns living outside the home region often do not speak the language fluently. Different orthographies have been developed, and a number of different grammatical standards exist and it is not possible to estimate accurately the number of fluent speakers of Rusyn, however, their number is estimated in the tens of thousands, primarily living in Ukraine and Slovakia. Serbia has recognized Rusyn, more precisely Pannonian Rusyn in Vojvodina, since 1995, Rusyn has been recognized as a minority language in Slovakia, enjoying the status of an official language in municipalities where more than 20 percent of the inhabitants speak Rusyn. Rusyn is listed as a language by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia and Romania. The Rusyn dialect was codified as a language in Vojvodina region of Yugoslavia in 1923, early grammars include Dmytrij Vyslockijs Карпаторусский букварь Vanja Hunjanky and Metodyj Trochanovskijs Буквар. The Carpatho-Rusyn language can be divided as follows, Boiko, Hutsul, Lemko, until World War II, the letter Ѣ ѣ was used, and was pronounced /ji/ or /i/. The Rusin Question in a Nutshell, a new Slavic language is born. The Rusyn literary language in Slovakia, the Slavic and East European Journal, Vol.42, No.2

28.
Lechitic languages
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The Lechitic languages are a language group consisting of Polish and several other languages that are or were spoken in areas of modern Poland and northeastern parts of modern Germany. It is one of the branches of the larger West Slavic language family, the branches of this family are the Czech–Slovak languages. The Lechitic languages are, Polish, used by approximately 38 million native speakers in Poland, Polish is considered to have several dialects, including Greater Polish, Lesser Polish and Masovian, among others. Kashubian, used today by over 110,000 people in the part of Pomerania, Silesian, used today by over 530,000 people in Polish Silesia. Characteristics of Lechitic languages include, Preservation of nasal vowels, development of proto-Slavic ě, e, ę into a, o, ǫ before hard consonants. This gives rise to such as modern Polish lato vs. lecie. Vocalization of the syllabic consonants r, r, l, l, compare modern Polish gardło with Czech hrdlo. Transposition of or, ol, er, el into ro etc. in many words between consonants, retention of Proto-Slavic *dz as an affricate, rather than a plain fricative z. Lack of the g → ɣ transition, the so-called fourth palatalization of velars in Polish and Kashubian. The term Lechitic is applied both to the languages of this group and to Slavic peoples speaking these languages, the term is related to the name of the legendary Polish forefather Lech and the name Lechia by which Poland was formerly sometimes known. Lechites Lech, Čech, and Rus Lechia

29.
Silesian language
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Silesian or Upper Silesian is a West Slavic lect, part of its Lechitic group. Its vocabulary has been influenced by Central German due to the existence of numerous Silesian German speakers in the area prior to World War II and after. There is no consensus on whether Silesian is a language or a somewhat divergent dialect of Polish. Silesian speakers currently live in the region of Upper Silesia, which is split between southwestern Poland and the northeastern Czech Republic. At present Silesian is commonly spoken in the area between the border of Silesia on the east and a line from Syców to Prudnik on the west as well as in the Rawicz area. Until 1945 Silesian was also spoken in enclaves in Lower Silesia, in 2003, the National Publishing Company of Silesia commenced operations. This publisher was founded by the Alliance of the People of the Silesian Nation and it prints books about Silesia, in July 2007, the Slavic Silesian language was given the ISO 639-3 code szl. On 6 September 2007,23 politicians of the Polish parliament made a statement about a new law to give Silesian the official status of a regional language, the first official National Dictation Contest of the Silesian language took place in August 2007. In dictation as many as 10 forms of writing systems and orthography have been accepted, on 30 January 2008 and in June 2008, two organizations promoting Silesian language were established, Pro Loquela Silesiana and Tôwarzistwo Piastowaniô Ślónskij Môwy Danga. On 26 May 2008, the Silesian Wikipedia was founded, on 30 June 2008 in the edifice of the Silesian Parliament in Katowice, a conference took place on the status of the Silesian language. This conference was a forum for politicians, linguists, representatives of interested organizations and persons who deal with the Silesian language, the conference was titled Silesian — Still a Dialect or Already a Language. Ślabikŏrzowy szrajbōnek is the new alphabet created by the Pro Loquela Silesiana organization to reflect the sounds of all Silesian dialects. It was approved by Silesian organizations affiliated in Rada Górnośląska, ubuntu translation is in this alphabet as is the Silesian Wikipedia. It is used in a few books, including the Silesian alphabet book. Letters, A, Ã, B, C, Ć, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, Ł, M, N, Ń, O, Ŏ, Ō, Ô, Õ, P, R, S, Ś, T, U, W, Y, Z, Ź, Ż. One of the first alphabets created specifically for Silesian was Steuers Silesian alphabet, created in the Interwar period, Silesians phonetic alphabet replaces the digraphs with single letters and does not include the letter Ł, whose sound can be represented phonetically with U. It is therefore the alphabet contains the fewest letters. Large parts of the Silesian Wikipedia, however, are written in Silesians phonetic alphabet, although the morphological differences between Silesian and Polish have been researched extensively, other grammatical differences have not been studied in depth

30.
Pomeranian language
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The Pomeranian language is a group of dialects from the Lechitic cluster of the West Slavic languages. In medieval contexts, it refers to the dialects spoken by the Slavic Pomeranians, in modern contexts, the term is sometimes used synonymously with Kashubian and may also include extinct Slovincian. The name Pomerania comes from Slavic po more, which means by the sea, during the early medieval Slavic migrations, the area between the Oder and Vistula rivers was settled by tribes grouped as Pomeranians. Their dialects, sometimes referred to as Ancient Pomeranian, had transitory character between the Polabian dialects spoken west of Pomerania, and the Old Polish dialects spoken to the Southeast. While there are no surviving documents written in Pomeranian, medieval Pomeranian names are mentioned in documents written in other languages. This was especially the case in Pomerelia, where the Slavic population became known as Kashubians, an insular Slavic Pomeranian dialect spoken northwest of Kashubia until the 20th century became known as Slovincian. It is disputed whether Slovincian may be regarded as a dialect of Kashubian or a separate language, likewise, it is disputed whether Kashubian may be regarded as a dialect of Polish or a separate language. Stefan Ramułt was fascinated by Florian Ceynowa and decidedly supported giving Kashubian the status of a standard language. The Pomeranian language influenced the formation of other Polish language dialects, such as, undoubtedly, they belong to the Polish language, but they also have some features in common with the Pomeranian language, which proves their character was transitional. Friedrich Lorentz supposed that Kociewski and Borewiacki dialects first belonged to the Pomeranian language and was then Polonized as a result of the Polish colonization of these territories, according to Lorentz, the Krajniacki dialect most probably was originally a part of the Polish language. The common feature of the Kociewski dialects and the Kashubian language is, for example, the preservation of the so-called “TarT” group. For the Borowiacki dialects and the Pomeranian language, the feature was affrication of dorsal consonants. The Pomeranian language also influenced the Low German dialects, which were used in Pomerania, after Germanisation, the population of Western Pomerania started to use the Low German dialects. Those dialects, though, were influenced by the Pomeranian language, most words originating from Pomeranian can be found in vocabulary connected with fishery and farming. The word Zeese / Zehse may serve as an example and it describes a kind of a fishing net and is still known in the Low German dialects of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern today. The word comes from the old Pomeranian word of the same meaning- seza and it moved to Kashubian and Slovincian dialects through Low German, and appeared in Pomeranian dictionaries as ceza meaning “flounder and perch fishing net”. Thus, it is so called “reverse loan-word” as the Pomeranian language borrowed the word from Low German in which it functioned as “Pomoranism”, a borrowing from the Pomeranian language which has been used in everyday German language and has appeared in dictionaries is a phrase “dalli, dalli”. It moved to the German language through the German dialects of West Prussia and it was classified by Aleksander Bruckner as one of the Old Polish dialects

31.
Kashubian language
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Kashubian or Cassubian is a language variety of the Lechitic group, of the Slavic languages. Although it is considered a language in its own right. In Poland, it has been an officially recognized ethnic-minority language since 2005, approximately 106,000 people use mainly Kashubian at home. It is the remnant of the Pomeranian language. It is close to standard Polish with influence from Low German, the Pomeranians were said to arrive before the Poles and certain tribes managed to maintain their language and traditions despite German and Polish settlements. It first diverged as its own language in the early 14th century, in the 19th century, Florian Ceynowa became Kashubians first known activist. He undertook tremendous efforts to awaken Kashubian self-identity through the establishment of Kashubian language, customs and he felt strongly that Poles were born brothers and that Kashubia was a separate nation. The Young Kashubian movement followed in 1912, led by author and doctor Aleksander Majkowski, the group contributed significantly to the development of the Kashubian literary language. The earliest printed documents in Kashubian date from the end of the 16th century, the modern orthography was first proposed in 1879. Many scholars and linguists debate whether Kashubian should be recognized as a Polish dialect or separate language, from the diachronic view it is a Lechitic West Slavic language but from the synchronic point of view it is a Polish dialect. Kashubian is closely related to Slovincian, while both of them are dialects of Pomeranian, many linguists, in Poland and elsewhere, consider it a divergent dialect of Polish. Dialectal diversity is so great within Kashubian that a speaker of southern Kashubian has considerable difficulty in understanding a speaker of the northernmost dialects, the spelling and grammar of Polish words written in Kashubian is highly unusual making it difficult to comprehend in written text also by native Polish speakers. Like Polish, Kashubian includes about 5% loanwords from German, unlike Polish, these are mostly from Low German and only occasionally from High German. Other sources of loanwords include the Baltic languages, Russian, due to soft pronunciation, the language is fairly similar to Belarusian. The number of speakers of Kashubian varies widely from source to source, in the 2011 census,106,000 people in Poland declared that they mainly use Kashubian at home. Of these only 10 percent consider Kashubian to be their mother tongue, all Kashubian speakers are also fluent in Polish. A number of schools in Poland use Kashubian as a teaching language and it is an official alternative language for local administration purposes in Gmina Sierakowice, Gmina Linia, Gmina Parchowo, Gmina Luzino and Gmina Żukowo in the Pomeranian Voivodeship. Most respondents say that Kashubian is used in speech among family members

32.
Sorbian languages
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The Sorbian languages are two closely related languages spoken by the Sorbs, a Slavic minority in the Lusatia region of eastern Germany. They are classified under the West Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages, historically the languages have also been known as Wendish or Lusatian. Their collective ISO 639-2 code is wen and they are closely related to Polish, Kashubian, Czech and Slovak. There are two languages, Upper Sorbian, spoken by about 40,000 people in Saxony. The area where the two languages are spoken is known as Lusatia, outside Lusatia, it has been superseded by German, following official discrimination from the 13th century on. The printed language developed around the main Bible translations into Sorbian, in Germany, Upper and Lower Sorbian are officially recognized and protected as minority languages. In the home areas of the Sorbs, both languages are recognized as official language next to German. The city of Bautzen in Upper Lusatia is the centre of Upper Sorbian culture, bilingual signs can be seen around the city, including the name of the city, Bautzen/Budyšin. The city of Cottbus is considered the centre of Lower Sorbian. Sorbian has also spoken in the small Sorbian settlement of Serbin in Lee County, Texas. Until recently newspapers were published in Sorbian there, the local dialect has been heavily influenced by surrounding speakers of German and English. Both Upper and Lower Sorbian have the dual for nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs, for example, the word ruka is used for one hand, ruce for two hands, and ruki for more than two hands. As with most of the Slavic languages, Sorbians uses no articles

33.
Upper Sorbian language
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Upper Sorbian is a minority language spoken by Sorbs in Germany in the historical province of Upper Lusatia, which is today part of Saxony. It is grouped in the West Slavic language branch, together with Lower Sorbian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, the history of the Upper Sorbian language in Germany began with the Slavic migrations during the 6th century AD. Beginning in the 12th century, there was an influx of rural Germanic settlers from Flanders, Saxony. The succeeding devastation of the country by military actions began the slow decrease of the Upper Sorbian language, in addition, in the Saxony region, the Sorbian language was legally subordinated to the German language. Further, there was the condition in many guilds of the cities of the area to only members of German-language origin. However, the areas of the Milzener and Lusitzer, in the area of the todays Lausitz, were relatively unaffected by the new German language settlements. By the 17th century, the number of Upper Sorbian speakers in that area grew to over 300,000, the oldest evidence of written Upper Sorbian is the Burger Eydt Wendisch monument, which was discovered in the city of Bautzen and dated to the year 1532. There are estimated to be 40,000 speakers of Upper Sorbian, the vowel inventory of Upper Sorbian is exactly the same as that of Lower Sorbian. It is also similar to the vowel inventory of Slovene. /i/ is mid-centralized to after hard consonants, /e, o/ are diphthongized to in slow speech. The /e–ɛ/ and /o–ɔ/ distinctions are weakened or lost in unstressed syllables, /v, d͡z, t͡sʲ, zʲ/ are very rare. /β/ is a somewhat velarized bilabial approximant, whereas /ɥ/ is a strongly palatalized bilabial approximant, in most dialects, /t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ, ʃ, ʒ/ are palato-alveolar. This is unlike Lower Sorbian, where these consonants are laminal retroflex, laminal retroflex realizations of /ʃ, ʒ/ also occur in Upper Sorbian dialects spoken in some villages north of Hoyerswerda. An aspirated is an allophone of /x/ in some cases. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Upper Sorbian, Wšitcy čłowjekojo su wot naroda swobodni a su jenacy po dostojnosći a prawach. Woni su z rozumom a swědomjom wobdarjeni a maja mjezsobu w duchu bratrowstwa wobchadźeć. de at slovnik. vancl. eu at sibz. whyi. org at Boehmak. de at Boehmak. de at sibz. whyi. org

34.
Lower Sorbian language
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Lower Sorbian is a Slavic minority language spoken in eastern Germany in the historical province of Lower Lusatia, today part of Brandenburg. It is one of the two literary Sorbian languages, the other being Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian is spoken in and around the city of Cottbus in Brandenburg. Signs in this region are bilingual, and Cottbus has a Gymnasium where one language of instruction is Lower Sorbian. It is a endangered language. Most native speakers are in the oldest generation today, the phonology of Lower Sorbian has been greatly influenced by contact with German, especially in Cottbus and larger towns. For example, German-influenced pronunciation tends to have a voiced uvular fricative instead of the alveolar trill, in villages and rural areas German influence is less marked, and the pronunciation is more typically Slavic. /m, mʲ, p, pʲ, b, bʲ, w, wʲ/ are bilabial, whereas /f, /n, nʲ, l, r, rʲ/ are alveolar, whereas /t, d, t͡s, s, z/ are dental. /t͡ʂ, ʂ, ʐ/ are laminal retroflex in all of the Lower Sorbian–speaking area and this is unlike in standard Upper Sorbian, where these are palato-alveolar. /h/ is voiceless, unlike Upper Sorbian, where it is voiced and it is also very similar to the vowel inventory of Slovene. /i/ is retracted to after hard consonants, /e, o/ are diphthongized to in slow speech. The /e–ɛ/ and /o–ɔ/ distinctions are weakened or lost in unstressed syllables, article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Lower Sorbian, Wšykne luźe su lichotne roźone a jadnake po dostojnosći a pšawach. Woni maju rozym a wědobnosć a maju ze sobu w duchu bratšojstwa wobchadaś, Upper Sorbian language Dolnoserbski radio program Lower Sorbian Vocabulary List at slovnik. vancl. eu/dls at dolnoserbski. de at Korpus GENIE at dolnoserbski. de Lexikalische Übungen und Terminologie

35.
Church Slavonic language
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The language also occasionally appears in the services of the Orthodox Church in America. It was also used by the Orthodox Churches in Romanian lands until the late 17th and early 18th centuries, attestation of Church Slavonic traditions appear in Early Cyrillic and Glagolitic script. Glagolitic has nowadays fallen out of use, though both scripts were used from the earliest attested period, the first Church Slavonic printed book was the Missale Romanum Glagolitice in angular Glagolitic, followed shortly by five Cyrillic liturgical books printed in Kraków in 1491. In recent centuries, however, Church Slavonic was fully replaced by local languages in the non-Slavic countries, even in some of the Slavic Orthodox countries, the modern national language is now used for liturgical purposes to a greater or lesser extent. Nevertheless, the Russian Orthodox Church, which contains half of all Orthodox believers. Church Slavonic language is actually a set of at least four different dialects, the most widespread recension, Russian, has, in turn, several local sub-dialects with slightly different pronunciations. For the list and descriptions of extinct recensions, see article Old Church Slavonic language, the Russian recension of New Church Slavonic is the language of books since the second half of the 17th century. It generally uses traditional Cyrillic script, however, certain texts can be printed in modern alphabets with the spelling adapted to rules of local languages, before the eighteenth century, Church Slavonic was in wide use as a general literary language in Russia. Although it was never spoken per se outside church services, members of the priesthood, poets, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was gradually replaced by the Russian language in secular literature and was retained for use only in church. Although as late as the 1760s, Lomonosov argued that Church Slavonic was the high style of Russian, during the nineteenth century within Russia. Elements of Church Slavonic style may have survived longest in speech among the Old Believers after the late-seventeenth century schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian has borrowed many words from Church Slavonic. While both Russian and Church Slavonic are Slavic languages, some early Slavic sound combinations evolved differently in each branch. As a result, the borrowings into Russian are similar to native Russian words, since the Russian Romantic era and the corpus of work of the great Russian authors, the relationship between words in these pairs has become traditional. In Russia, Church Slavonic is pronounced in the way as Russian, with some exceptions, Church Slavonic features okanye and yekanye. That is, о and е in unstressed positions are always read as and ~ respectively, there should be no de-voicing of final consonants, although in practice there often is. The letter е is never read as ё ~, the letter Γ can traditionally be read as voiced fricative velar sound, however, occlusive is also possible and legal since the 20th century. When unvoiced, it becomes, this has influenced the Russian pronunciation of Бог as Boh, the adjective endings -аго/-его/-ого/-яго are pronounced as written, whereas Russian -его/-ого are pronounced with instead of. In Serbia, Church Slavonic is generally pronounced according to the Russian model, the medieval Serbian recension of Church Slavonic was gradually replaced by the Russian recension since the early eighteenth century

36.
Serbian language
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Serbian is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs. It is the language of Serbia and one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In addition, it is a minority language in Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia. Standard Serbian is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian, which is also the basis of Standard Croatian, Bosnian, the other dialect spoken by Serbs is Torlakian in southeastern Serbia, which is transitional to Macedonian and Bulgarian. Serbian is practically the only European standard language with complete synchronic digraphia, the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was devised in 1814 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, who created the alphabet on phonemic principles. The Latin alphabet was designed by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1830, Serbian is a standardized variety of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, of the South Slavic subgroup. Other standardized forms of Serbo-Croatian are Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin and it has lower intelligibility with the Eastern South Slavic languages Bulgarian and Macedonian, than with Slovene. The 2011 census show that 42. 88% still declare Serbian to be their native language, Standard Serbian language uses both Cyrillic and Latin script. Even in official government documents this constitutional requirement is rarely enforced, Serbian is a rare example of synchronic digraphia, a situation where all literate members of a society have two interchangeable writing systems available to them. Media and publishers typically select one alphabet or another, for example, the public broadcaster, Radio Television of Serbia, predominantly uses the Cyrillic script whereas the privately run broadcasters, like RTV Pink, predominantly use the Latin script. A survey from 2014 showed that 47% of the Serbian population favors the Latin alphabet whereas 36% favors the Cyrillic one and these are the tenses of the indicative mood. Apart from the mood, there is also the imperative mood. The conditional mood has two more tenses, the first conditional and the second conditional, Serbian has active and passive voice. As for the verb forms, Serbian has one infinitive. Most Serbian words are of native Slavic lexical stock, tracing back to the Proto-Slavic language, there are many loanwords from different languages, reflecting cultural interaction throughout history. Notable loanwords were borrowed from Greek, Latin, Italian, Turkish, Hungarian, Russian, Serbian literature emerged in the Middle Ages, and included such works as Miroslavljevo jevanđelje in 1192 and Dušanov zakonik in 1349. In the mid-15th century, Serbia was conquered by the Ottoman Empire, however, some of the greatest literary works in Serbian come from this time, in the form of oral literature, the most notable form being Serbian epic poetry. The epic poems were written down in the 19th century, and preserved in oral tradition up to the 1950s

37.
Croatian language
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It is the official and literary standard of Croatia and one of the official languages of the European Union. Croatian is also one of the languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a recognized minority language in Serbia. Croatian is written in Gajs Latin alphabet, besides the Shtokavian dialect, on which Standard Croatian is based, there are two other main dialects, Chakavian and Kajkavian. It is still used now in parts of Istria, which became a crossroads of various mixtures of Chakavian with Ekavian/Ijekavian/Ikavian dialects, the cultural apex of this 17th century idiom is represented by the editions of Adrianskoga mora sirena by Petar Zrinski and Putni tovaruš by Katarina Zrinska. However, this first linguistic renaissance in Croatia was halted by the execution of Petar Zrinski. Subsequently the Croatian elite in the 18th century gradually abandoned this combined Croatian standard, specifically, three major groups of dialects were spoken on Croatian territory, and there had been several literary languages over four centuries. The leader of the Illyrian movement Ljudevit Gaj standardized the Latin alphabet in 1830–1850, the uniform Neo-Shtokavian then became common in the Croatian elite. In the 1860s, the Zagreb Philological School dominated the Croatian cultural life, drawing upon linguistic, while it was dominant over the rival Rijeka Philological School and Zadar Philological Schools, its influence waned with the rise of the Croatian Vukovians. Croatian is commonly characterized by the Ijekavian pronunciation, the use of the Latin alphabet. Some differences are absolute, while some appear mainly in the frequency of use, Croatian, although technically a form of Serbo-Croatian, is sometimes considered a distinct language by itself. Differences between various forms of Serbo-Croatian are often exaggerated for political reasons. Most Croatian linguists regard Croatian as a language that is considered key to national identity. The issue is sensitive in Croatia as the notion of a language being the most important characteristic of a nation is widely accepted. The terms Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat are still used as a term for all these forms by foreign scholars. Within ex-Yugoslavia, the term has largely replaced by the ethnic terms Serbian, Croatian. In 2013, the EU started publishing a Croatian language version of its official gazette, Standard Croatian is the official language of the Republic of Croatia and, along with Standard Bosnian and Standard Serbian, one of three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is also official in the regions of Burgenland, Molise, additionally, it has co-official status alongside Romanian in the communes of Carașova and Lupac, Romania. Croatian is officially used and taught at all the universities in Croatia, there is no regulatory body that determines the proper usage of Croatian

38.
Bosnian language
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Bosnian /ˈbɒzniən/ is the standardized variety of Serbo-Croatian mainly used by Bosniaks. Bosnian uses both Latin and Cyrillic alphabet, with Latin in everyday use and it is notable among the varieties of Serbo-Croatian for a number of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian loanwords, largely due to the languages interaction with those cultures through Islamic ties. Bosnian is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian, more specifically on Eastern Herzegovinian, which is also the basis of Croatian, Serbian, vernacular literature written in Bosnian with the Arebica script was relatively thin and sparse. The main authors were the polymath, politician and poet Safvet-beg Bašagić, the modern Bosnian standard took shape in the 1990s and 2000s. The name Bosnian language is an issue for some Croats and Serbs. Bosniak linguists however insist that the legitimate name is Bosnian language. The controversy arises because the name Bosnian may seem to imply that it is the language of all Bosnians, while Bosnian Croats, the language is called Bosnian language in the 1995 Dayton Accords and is concluded by observers to have received legitimacy and international recognition at the time. The International Organization for Standardization, United States Board on Geographic Names, most English-speaking language encyclopaedias register the language solely as Bosnian language. The Library of Congress registered the language as Bosnian and gave it an ISO-number, the Slavic language institutes in English-speaking countries offer courses in Bosnian or Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language, not in Bosniak language. The same thing in German-speaking countries, where the language is taught under the name Bosnisch, not Bosniakisch with very few exceptions. The Croatian state institutions, such as the Central Bureau of Statistics, the majority of Serbian linguists hold that the term Bosniak language is the only one appropriate, which was agreed as early as 1990. The original text of the Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was agreed in Vienna, the constitution of Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina, did not recognize any language or ethnic group other than Serbian. Bosniaks were mostly expelled from the controlled by the Serbs from 1992. The Bosnian Serbs refused to make reference to the Bosnian language in their constitution, serbia includes the Bosnian language as an elective subject in primary schools. The differences between the Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian literary standards are minimal, although Bosnian employs more Turkish, Persian, and Arabic loanwords—commonly called orientalisms—it is very similar to both Serbian and Croatian in its written and spoken form. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Grammar, With Sociolinguistic Commentary, festschrift für Clemens-Peter Herbermann zum 60. Bosnisch, Kroatisch, Serbisch – Wie spricht man eigentlich in Bosnien-Herzegowina, die Ordnung des Standard und die Differenzierung der Diskurse, Teil 1. Archived from the original on 30 March 2013, jezička/e politika/e u Bosni i Hercegovini i njemačkom govornom području, zbornik radova predstavljenih na istoimenoj konferenciji održanoj 22

39.
Montenegrin language
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Montenegrin /ˌmɒntᵻˈniːɡrᵻn/ is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language used as the official language of Montenegro. Montenegros language has historically and traditionally been called Serbian, the idea of a Montenegrin standard language separate from Serbian appeared in the 2000s after Serbia and Montenegro broke up, via proponents of Montenegrin independence. Montenegrin became the language of Montenegro with the ratification of a new constitution on 22 October 2007. The Montenegrin standard is still emerging and its orthography was established on 10 July 2009 with the addition of two letters to the alphabet, although the grammar and a school curriculum are yet to be approved. Their usage remained controversial and they achieved only limited public acceptance and they had been used for official documents since 2009, but in February 2017, the Assembly of Montenegro removed them from any type of governmental documentation. In January 2008, the government of Montenegro formed the Council for the Codification of the Montenegrin Language, proceeding documents will, after verification, become a part of the educational programme in Montenegrin schools. The first Montenegrin standard was proposed in July 2009. In addition to the Serbo-Croatian standard, the proposal introduced two additional letters, ⟨ś⟩ and ⟨ź⟩, to replace the digraphs ⟨sj⟩ and ⟨zj⟩. The Council has criticized this act, saying it comes from a small group, on 21 June 2010, the Council for General Education adopted the first Montenegrin Grammar. The language remains an issue in Montenegro. In the previous census of 1991, the vast majority of Montenegrin citizens,510,320 or 82. 97%, declared themselves speakers of the official language. The 1981 population census recorded a Serbo-Croatian-speaking majority. However, in the first Communist censuses, the vast majority of the population declared Serbian their native language, according to the Constitution of Montenegro, the official language of the republic since 1992 is Serbian of the Ijekavian standard. After World War II and until 1992, the language of Montenegro was Serbo-Croatian. Before that, in the previous Montenegrin realm, the language in use was called Serbian, the new constitution, adopted on 19 October 2007, deemed Montenegrin to be the official language of Montenegro. The most recent population census conducted in Montenegro was in 2011, according to it,36. 97% of the population declared Montenegrin their native language, and 42. 88% declared Serbian their native language. Mijat Šuković, a prominent Montenegrin lawyer, wrote a version of the constitution which passed the parliaments constitutional committee. Šuković suggested Montenegrin as the language of Montenegro

40.
Burgenland Croatian
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Burgenland Croatian is a regional variety of the Chakavian dialect of the Croatian language spoken in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Burgenland Croatian is recognized as a minority language in the Austrian state of Burgenland where it is spoken by 19,412 people according to official reports, smaller Croatian minorities in western Hungary, southwestern Slovakia and southern Czech Republic are often also called Burgenland Croats. They use the Burgenland Croatian written language and are historically and culturally connected to the Austrian Croats. Burgenland Croats included speakers of all three dialects of the Croatian, with the majority being the Chakavians and they originally came from the river Una valley. Burgenland Croats did not take part in the shaping of the present standard Croatian in the 19th century, instead, they constructed their own written standard based mainly on the local Chakavian speech and adopted the Croatian alphabet, a modified Latin alphabet, as their script. It is still a matter of debate whether Burgenland Croatian should be classified as a Slavic micro-language of its own, Burgenland Croatian dialects are mostly viewed as isolated dialects of the Croatian. Burgenland Croatian and the Prekmurje dialect of Slovene have influenced each other, the first Prekmurje Slovene works was applied to the Burgenland Croatian books. A few of those that wrote in Prekmurje Slovene were of Burgenland Croatian descent, after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918 the areas in which Burgenland Croats lived were divided between Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. After 1921 most of these became part of Austria, which established a new province of Burgenland. In 1922 Austria founded the Apostolic administration of Burgenland and began to abolish bilingual schools through the introduction of the teaching of German in all primary schools and this process was temporarily stopped after The National Education Act, that allowed the work of the Croatian elementary schools, was adopted. After Hitler Annexed Austria in 1938 this law was abolished, in 1955 the Austrian State Treaty was signed. It gave permission to the Burgenland Croats to use Croatian in education, judiciary, with the adoption of the Law on National Minorities in 1976 use of Croatian in public life became limited. After constitutional complaint was accepted in 1987 parts of the law were changed, Burgenland Croatian written language is based mainly on the local Chakavian speech with some influences from the other Croatian dialects spoken in Burgenland. It uses the Latin alphabet with the same diacritical modifiers as the Croatian alphabet, in the course of language development it acquired some of its own specialised vocabulary, sometimes different from that used in standard Croatian. The popular The Little Prince has also translated into Burgenland Croatian. Newspapers of the Burgenland Croats are, Crikveni glasnik,1946, Naše selo,1947, Naš tjednik,1947, Naša domovina,1952, Glas,1957, Novi glas,1969, Put, 1981). The beginnings of literacy are linked to, Klimpuški misal, S. Consul Histrianus and Anton Dalmatins Postila, Duševne pesne, by the mid-19th literature had religious character and was intended mostly for peasants. Main writers were priests and nuns, in the second half of the 19th century teachers begin to write

41.
North Slavic languages
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The term North Slavic languages has three meanings. Some Slavists believe that a separate, now extinct, branch of North Slavic languages once existed, there is also a group of artistic languages forming a fictional North Slavic branch of the Slavic languages. The authors of these languages were inspired by the existence of West, East and South Slavic languages, most of these languages therefore have an experimental character, they suppose a certain influence of the Germanic, Uralic, or Baltic languages. Despite the fact that the creators of these languages have worked independently from other and in different time frames. The best-known examples of constructed North Slavic languages are, Sevorian, Nassian, Seversk, Slavëni, bernard Comrie & Greville G. Corbett, The Slavonic languages, pp.75 & 115-119. Andrii Danylenko,2006, The Greek Accusative vs. the New Slavic Accusative in the Impersonal Environment, in, Andrii Danylenko, Slavica et Islamica. Dragvoll, University of Trondheim, Linguistics Department, ss, frederik Kortlandt, Early dialectal diversity in South Slavic II, in, Dutch Contributions to the Thirteenth International Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana, Linguistics. Amsterdam – New York, Rodopi,2003, 215-235, frederik Kortlandt, From Proto-Indo-European to Slavic Gilbert C. Rappaport, A Minimalist Approach to Case Marking in Slavic Alan Timberlake,1978, american Contributions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists, vol. Hannu Tommola,2000, On the Perfect in North Slavic, Östen Dahl, Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe. Sevorian artificially constructed language Nassian artificially constructed language Vozgian artificially constructed language Novegradian artificially constructed language

42.
Old Novgorod dialect
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Old Novgorod dialect is a term introduced by Andrey Zaliznyak to describe the dialect found used in the Old East Slavic birch bark writings. Dating from the 11th to 15th centuries, the letters were excavated in Novgorod, for linguists, Old Novgorodian is particularly of interest in that it has retained some archaic features which were lost in other Slavic dialects, such as the absence of second palatalization. Furthermore, letters provide evidence of the Slavic vernacular, as opposed to the Church Slavonic which dominated the written literature of the period. Most of the letters feature everyday business and personal correspondence, instructions, complaints, news, such widespread usage indicates a high level of literacy, including among women and children. The first birch bark letter was found on July 26,1951 by Nina Fedorovna Akulova, at least 1025 have been unearthed since,923 in Novgorod alone. Almost all of them were written with styluses of bronze and iron, the letters were preserved due to the swampy soil which isolated them from oxygen. Many letters are found buried amidst the layers under streets which were paved with logs. Some of the linguistic features are not found in any other Slavic dialect. мълъвити as opposed to мълвити retention of stem-final *x in Proto-Slavic *vьx- all whereas other Slavic languages have undergone the third Zaliznyak, вьхо lack of the Slavic second palatalization in root-final position, i. e. рукѣ, моги the change vl’ > l’, i. e, Яколь, Яковлев nominative singular masculine of o-stems -e, i. e. Иване, посаднике, хлѣбе genitive singular of а-stems in soft -ě, the same substitution is found in accusative plural of o-stems and a-stems. Nominative-accusative plural of а-stems in -ě, i. e, кобылѣ, сиротѣ Features of the Old Novgorod dialect ascertained by the philological study in the last decades are, lack of the second palatalization in root-initial position, i. e. кѣл-, хѣр- a particular reflex of Proto-Slavic *TьRT, *TъRT clusters, yielding TьRьT, however, in some dialects these yielded TroT, TreT. West-Slavic like reflex of *TоRT clusters, i. e, погродье versus погородие the change ml’ > n’, i. e. емлючи > енючи no merger of nominative and accusative singular of masculines regardless of animacy, the deviations are more abundant in older birch bark letters than in the more recent finds. This fact indicates, contrary to what may be expected, that the development was convergent rather than divergent, and now the princess has arrested me for it. But now druzhina has guaranteed for me, and now send a letter to that man and ask him whether he has another female slave. And I want to buy a horse and have the magistrate sit on it, and if you have not taken the money, do not take anything from him

43.
English language
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English /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/ is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the global lingua franca. Named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to England, English is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third most common language in the world, after Mandarin. It is the most widely learned second language and a language of the United Nations, of the European Union. It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch, English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the century, are called Old English. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England, Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London and the King James Bible, and the start of the Great Vowel Shift. Through the worldwide influence of the British Empire, modern English spread around the world from the 17th to mid-20th centuries, English is an Indo-European language, and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages. Most closely related to English are the Frisian languages, and English, Old Saxon and its descendent Low German languages are also closely related, and sometimes Low German, English, and Frisian are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic languages. Modern English descends from Middle English, which in turn descends from Old English, particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other English languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy dialects of Ireland. English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares new language features with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German and these shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor, which linguists call Proto-Germanic. Through Grimms law, the word for foot begins with /f/ in Germanic languages, English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic. The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon, in the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain and the Romans withdrew from Britain. England and English are named after the Angles, Old English was divided into four dialects, the Anglian dialects, Mercian and Northumbrian, and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon. Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex. The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian. A few short inscriptions from the period of Old English were written using a runic script. By the sixth century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms and it included the runic letters wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨þ⟩, and the modified Latin letters eth ⟨ð⟩, and ash ⟨æ⟩

Slavs
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Slavs are the largest Indo-European ethno-linguistic group in Europe. They are native to Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, Northeastern Europe, North Asia, Slavs speak Slavic languages of the Balto-Slavic language group. From the early 6th century they spread to inhabit most of Central, states with Slavic languages comprise over

Central and Eastern Europe
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It is in use after the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989–90. In scholarly literature the abbreviations CEE or CEEC are often used for this concept, the transition countries in Europe are thus classified today into two political-economic entities, CEE and CIS. According to the World Bank, the transition is over for the 10 countries that joined th

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The pre-1989 "Eastern Bloc" (orange) superimposed on current borders

Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety

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Kievan Rus' in the 11th century

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Flag

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The Baptism of Kievans, by Klavdy Lebedev

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Sergius of Radonezh blessing Dmitry Donskoy in Trinity Sergius Lavra, before the Battle of Kulikovo, depicted in a painting by Ernst Lissner

Language family
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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the pr

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Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world.

Indo-European languages
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The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, the most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with ove

1.
Franz Bopp, pioneer in the field of comparative linguistic studies.

Balto-Slavic languages
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The Balto-Slavic languages are a branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It traditionally comprises the Baltic and Slavic languages, Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to a period of common development. Some linguists, however, have suggested that Balto-Slav

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Eastern Slavic

East Slavic languages
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The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of Slavic languages, currently spoken in Eastern Europe. It is the group with the largest numbers of speakers, far out-numbering the Western and Southern Slavic groups, the existing East Slavic languages are Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, Rusyn is considered to be either a sep

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Countries where an East Slavic language is the national language

South Slavic languages
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The South Slavic languages are one of three branches of the Slavic languages. There are approximately 30 million speakers, mainly in the Balkans and these are separated geographically from speakers of the other two Slavic branches by a belt of German, Hungarian and Romanian speakers. The first South Slavic language to be written was the variety spo

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Prekmurian Lutheran New Testament in the 18th-century Nouvi Zákon

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Countries where a South Slavic language is the national language

West Slavic languages
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The West Slavic languages are a subdivision of the Slavic language group that includes Czech, Polish, Slovak, Silesian, Kashubian, Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian. The West Slavic languages are all written using Latin script, in contrast to the Cyrillic-using East Slavic branch, the early Slavic expansion reached Central Europe in c. the 7th centur

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Groups and dialects

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Countries where a West Slavic language is the national language

Eastern Europe
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Eastern Europe, also known as East Europe, is the eastern part of the European continent. There is no consensus on the area it covers, partly because the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, cultural. There are almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region, a related United Nations paper adds that

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Division between the Eastern and Western Churches

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Geographic features of Eastern Europe

Proto-language
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In the strict sense, a proto-language is the latest common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the start of the familys divergence into the attested daughter languages. It is therefore equivalent with the language or parental language of a language family. Moreover, a group of idioms which are not considered separate languages can als

Early Middle Ages
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The Early Middle Ages marked the start of the Middle Ages of European history, lasting from the 6th to the 10th century CE. The Early Middle Ages followed the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the Early Middle Ages largely overlap with Late Antiquity. The term Late Antiquity is used to emphasize elements of continuity with the Roman Empire, the

1.
Die Hunnen im Kampf mit den Alanen, (The Huns in battle with the Alans by Johann Nepomuk Geiger, 1873). The Alans, an Iranian people who lived north and east of the Black Sea, were Europe's first line of defence against the Asiatic Huns. They were dislocated and settled throughout the Roman Empire

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Charlemagne 's empire (814)

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The Mausoleum of Theodoric in Ravenna is the only extant example of Ostrogothic architecture.

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A paten from the Treasure of Gourdon

Baltic languages
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The Baltic languages belong to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Baltic languages are spoken by the Balts, mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe, scholars usually regard them as a single language family divided into two groups, Western Baltic, and Eastern Baltic. The range of t

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Balto-Slavic languages.

National language
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A national language is a that has some connection—de facto or de jure—with people and the territory they occupy. There is little consistency in the use of this term, one or more languages spoken as first languages in the territory of a country may be referred to informally or designated in legislation as national languages of the country. National

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The logo of the Swiss Federal administration, in the four national languages of Switzerland.

Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and b

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This page from an "ABC" book printed in Moscow in 1694 shows the letter П.

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The Ostromir Gospels of 1056 is the second oldest East Slavic book known, one of many medieval illuminated manuscripts preserved in the Russian National Library.

Belarusian language
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Belarusian is an official language of Belarus, along with Russian, and is spoken abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and small parts in far-eastern Poland. Following independence, it became known as Belarusian. Belarusian is one of the East Slavic languages and shares many grammatical and lexical features with other members of the group, to some ex

Ukrainian language
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Ukrainian /juːˈkreɪniən/ is an East Slavic language. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic script, historical linguists trace the origin of the Ukrainian language to the Old East Slavic of the early medieval state of Kievan Rus. After the fall of the Kievan Rus as well as the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, the Modern Ukrainian language has

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Miniature of St Luke from the Peresopnytsia Gospels (1561).

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Ukrainian-speaking world

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The 1921 Soviet recruitment poster. It uses traditional Ukrainian imagery with Ukrainian-language text: "Son! Enroll in the school of Red commanders, and the defense of Soviet Ukraine will be ensured."

Polish language
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Polish is a West Slavic language spoken primarily in Poland and is the native language of the Poles. It belongs to the Lechitic subgroup of the West Slavic languages, Polish is the official language of Poland, but it is also used throughout the world by Polish minorities in other countries. It is one of the languages of the European Union. Its writ

Czech language
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Czech, historically also Bohemian, is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group. It is spoken by over 10 million people and is the language of the Czech Republic. Czech is closely related to Slovak, to the point of being intelligible to a very high degree. In the later 18th to mid-19th century, the written standard was codified in the contex

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The Bible of Kralice was the first complete translation of the Bible into the Czech language. Its six volumes were first published between 1579 and 1593.

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regions where Czech is the language of the majority

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Jan Hus

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Josef Dobrovský, whose writing played a key role in reviving Czech as a written language

Slovak language
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Slovak /ˈsloʊvæk, -vɑːk/ is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages. Slovak is the language of Slovakia where it is spoken by approximately 5.51 million people. Slovak uses the Latin script with modifications that include the four diacritics placed above certain letters The primary principle of Slovak spelling is the pho

1.
regions where Slovak is the language of the majority

Slovene language
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Slovene or Slovenian belongs to the group of South Slavic languages. It is spoken by approximately 2.5 million speakers worldwide and it is the first language of about 2.1 million Slovenian people and is one of the 24 official and working languages of the European Union. Standard Slovene is the standard language that was formed in the 18th century,

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Tombstone of Jožef Nahtigal in Dobrova with archaic Slovene onikanje in indirect reference. Literal translation "Here lie [počivajo] the honorable Jožef Nahtigal... they were born [rojeni]... they died [umerli]... God grant them [jim] eternal peace and rest."

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Slovene-speaking areas

Serbo-Croatian
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It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties. South Slavic dialects historically formed a continuum, the turbulent history of the area, particularly due to expansion of the Ottoman Empire, resulted in a patchwork of dialectal and religious differences. Due to population migrations, Shtokavian became the most wide

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Humac tablet, ~1000 AD

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Areas where Serbo-Croatian is spoken by a plurality of speakers (as of 2005).

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Hval's Codex, 1404

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Humac tablet from the 10th century

Macedonian language
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It is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and a recognized minority language in parts of Albania, Romania and Serbia. Standard Macedonian was implemented as the language of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1945 and has since developed a modern literature. Most of the codification was formalized during the same period, Macedonia

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Struga Poetry Evenings Festival sign in Macedonia, written in the Macedonian language.

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regions where Macedonian is the language of the majority

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The front page of the Abecedar, school book published by the Greek government in 1925. The book was in the Lerin dialect and Latin script

Bulgarian language
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Bulgarian /bʌlˈɡɛəriən/, /bʊlˈ-/ is an Indo-European language, a member of the Southern branch of the Slavic language family. Various evidential verb forms exist to express unwitnessed, retold, with the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Bulgarian became one of the official languages of the European Union. Development of

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The Codex Zographensis is one of the oldest manuscripts in the Old Bulgarian language dated from the late 10th or early 11th century

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regions where Bulgarian is the language of the majority

Balkans
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The Balkan Peninsula, or the Balkans, is a peninsula and a cultural area in Eastern and Southeastern Europe with various and disputed borders. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains that stretch from the Serbia-Bulgaria border to the Black Sea, the highest point of the Balkans is Mount Musala 2,925 metres in the Rila mountain range. In

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The Balkan Peninsula, as defined by the Danube - Sava - Kupa line

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The Peninsula's most extensive definition, bordered by water on three sides and connected with a line on the fourth

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Panorama of Stara Planina. Its highest peak is Botev at a height of 2,376 m.

Central Europe
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Central Europe lies between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. The concept of Central Europe is based on a historical, social and cultural identity. Central Europe is going through a phase of strategic awakening, with such as the CEI, Centrope. While the regions economy shows high disparities with regard to income, elements of unity for Western and

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Certain and disputed borders of Great Moravia under Svatopluk I (AD 870–894)

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Central Europe according to The World Factbook (2009), Encyclopædia Britannica, and Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (1998)

Rusyn language
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Rusyn /ˈruːsᵻn/, also known in English as Ruthene UK /rʊˈθiːn/ US /ruːˈθiːn/, is an Eastern Slavic language spoken by the Rusyns of Eastern Europe and historically in parts of Central Europe. There are controversial political implications about the nature of Rusyn as a language or dialect, some linguists treat it as a distinct language, whereas som

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Ethnic map of Austria-Hungary; Ruthenians are light green, in the upper right corner.

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Rusyn

Lechitic languages
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The Lechitic languages are a language group consisting of Polish and several other languages that are or were spoken in areas of modern Poland and northeastern parts of modern Germany. It is one of the branches of the larger West Slavic language family, the branches of this family are the Czech–Slovak languages. The Lechitic languages are, Polish,

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Kashubian jamboree in Łeba in 2005 – banner showing the Kashubian name of Kartuzy County

Silesian language
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Silesian or Upper Silesian is a West Slavic lect, part of its Lechitic group. Its vocabulary has been influenced by Central German due to the existence of numerous Silesian German speakers in the area prior to World War II and after. There is no consensus on whether Silesian is a language or a somewhat divergent dialect of Polish. Silesian speakers

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Grave inscription at Lutheran cemetery in Střítež near Český Těšín. The inscription, which says "Rest in Peace", is in the Cieszyn Silesian dialect.

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Range of Silesian on a map of East-Central Europe (marked as G1 and G2, in southern Poland and the eastern Czech Republic).

Pomeranian language
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The Pomeranian language is a group of dialects from the Lechitic cluster of the West Slavic languages. In medieval contexts, it refers to the dialects spoken by the Slavic Pomeranians, in modern contexts, the term is sometimes used synonymously with Kashubian and may also include extinct Slovincian. The name Pomerania comes from Slavic po more, whi

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Stefan Ramułt's Dictionary of the Pomeranian (Kashubian) language, published in Kraków, 1893.

Kashubian language
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Kashubian or Cassubian is a language variety of the Lechitic group, of the Slavic languages. Although it is considered a language in its own right. In Poland, it has been an officially recognized ethnic-minority language since 2005, approximately 106,000 people use mainly Kashubian at home. It is the remnant of the Pomeranian language. It is close

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Two bilingual signs in Garcz in Kashubia with the Polish name above and the Kashubian name below

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Kashubian dialect areas (with ethnonyms)

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Bilingual sign in Polish and Kashubian in Pogórze, Puck County, Poland, on road from Gdynia to Rewa

Sorbian languages
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The Sorbian languages are two closely related languages spoken by the Sorbs, a Slavic minority in the Lusatia region of eastern Germany. They are classified under the West Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages, historically the languages have also been known as Wendish or Lusatian. Their collective ISO 639-2 code is wen and they are closely

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A bilingual sign in Bautzen

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The Sorbian-speaking region in Germany

Upper Sorbian language
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Upper Sorbian is a minority language spoken by Sorbs in Germany in the historical province of Upper Lusatia, which is today part of Saxony. It is grouped in the West Slavic language branch, together with Lower Sorbian, Czech, Polish, Slovak, the history of the Upper Sorbian language in Germany began with the Slavic migrations during the 6th century

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A bilingual sign in Germany; the lower part is in Upper Sorbian

Lower Sorbian language
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Lower Sorbian is a Slavic minority language spoken in eastern Germany in the historical province of Lower Lusatia, today part of Brandenburg. It is one of the two literary Sorbian languages, the other being Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian is spoken in and around the city of Cottbus in Brandenburg. Signs in this region are bilingual, and Cottbus has a

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Bilingual road sign in Cottbus, Germany

Church Slavonic language
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The language also occasionally appears in the services of the Orthodox Church in America. It was also used by the Orthodox Churches in Romanian lands until the late 17th and early 18th centuries, attestation of Church Slavonic traditions appear in Early Cyrillic and Glagolitic script. Glagolitic has nowadays fallen out of use, though both scripts w

1.
Page from the Spiridon Psalter in Church Slavonic

Serbian language
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Serbian is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs. It is the language of Serbia and one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In addition, it is a minority language in Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia. Standard Serbian is based on the most widespread dialect of Ser

Croatian language
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It is the official and literary standard of Croatia and one of the official languages of the European Union. Croatian is also one of the languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a recognized minority language in Serbia. Croatian is written in Gajs Latin alphabet, besides the Shtokavian dialect, on which Standard Croatian is based, there are two other m

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Features

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Traditional extent of Serbo-Croatian dialects in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnian language
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Bosnian /ˈbɒzniən/ is the standardized variety of Serbo-Croatian mainly used by Bosniaks. Bosnian uses both Latin and Cyrillic alphabet, with Latin in everyday use and it is notable among the varieties of Serbo-Croatian for a number of Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian loanwords, largely due to the languages interaction with those cultures throug

Montenegrin language
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Montenegrin /ˌmɒntᵻˈniːɡrᵻn/ is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language used as the official language of Montenegro. Montenegros language has historically and traditionally been called Serbian, the idea of a Montenegrin standard language separate from Serbian appeared in the 2000s after Serbia and Montenegro broke up, via proponents

Burgenland Croatian
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Burgenland Croatian is a regional variety of the Chakavian dialect of the Croatian language spoken in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Burgenland Croatian is recognized as a minority language in the Austrian state of Burgenland where it is spoken by 19,412 people according to official reports, smaller Croatian minorities in wester

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Grgur Mekinić: Dusevne Peszne (Ghostly Hymns), is one of the first Burgenland Croatian artworks (1609).

2.
Features

North Slavic languages
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The term North Slavic languages has three meanings. Some Slavists believe that a separate, now extinct, branch of North Slavic languages once existed, there is also a group of artistic languages forming a fictional North Slavic branch of the Slavic languages. The authors of these languages were inspired by the existence of West, East and South Slav

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The representation of northern Slavs as a collective term for Western and Eastern Slavs in an old ethnic map

Old Novgorod dialect
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Old Novgorod dialect is a term introduced by Andrey Zaliznyak to describe the dialect found used in the Old East Slavic birch bark writings. Dating from the 11th to 15th centuries, the letters were excavated in Novgorod, for linguists, Old Novgorodian is particularly of interest in that it has retained some archaic features which were lost in other

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Birch-bark letter no. 497, c. 1340-90, Novgorod; photograph

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Birch-bark letter no. 109, c. 1100, Novgorod; outline

English language
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English /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/ is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the global lingua franca. Named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to England, English is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states. It is the third most common language i

1.
The opening to the Old English epic poem Beowulf, handwritten in half-uncial script: Hƿæt ƿē Gārde/na ingēar dagum þēod cyninga / þrym ge frunon... "Listen! We of the Spear-Danes from days of yore have heard of the glory of the folk-kings..."

1.
A fragment of a vase collected by Mihail Dimitriu at the site of Poiana, Galaţi (Piroboridava), Romania illustrating the use of Greek and Latin letters by a Dacian potter (source: Dacia journal, 1933)

2.
Gold stater coin found in Dacia. Obverse: Roman magistrate with lictors. Legend ΚΟΣΩΝ (Coson) and (left centre) monogram BR or OΛB. Reverse: Eagle clutching laurel-wreath. Probably minted in a Greek Black sea city (Olbia?), commissioned by a Thracian or Getan king (Cotiso? Koson?) or by a high Roman official (Brutus?), in honour of the other. Late 1st century BC

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Dacia's map from a medieval book made after Ptolemy 's Geographia (c. 140 AD)

1.
Map of the Pre-Roman Iron Age culture(s) associated with Proto-Germanic, c. 500 BC. The red area shows the areal of the preceding Nordic Bronze Age in Scandinavia; the magenta-colored area towards the south represents the Jastorf culture of the North German Plain.